Military History May 2022

Simón Bolívar’s British Volunteers The Three Warlords Who Shaped Japan Knight vs. Knight in 1351 Grudge Match Portfolio: Death

by Remote Control HISTORYNET.com

D N A T FAS S U O I R FU ME A C S R E I R R A HOW U.S.TCHE WWII PACIFIC TO RULE

SB2C-4 Helldivers launched from the aircraft carrier Yorktown (CV-10) of Task Force 58—the U.S. Navy’s primary late–World War II Pacific strike force—head toward Iwo Jima to support Marine invasion forces.

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MAY 2022

Letters 6 News 8

22

Features

Fast and Furious

Led by such American naval icons as Nimitz, Spruance and Halsey, fast carrier task groups proved decisive in the Pacific War.

By Michael W. Robbins

34

The Trio Who Unified Japan

Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu forged a nation from a feudal war zone.

By M.G. Haynes

Departments

14

Interview Linda Hope Hope in the Ranks

16

Valor Taking Charge on Leyte

2 MILITARY HISTORY MAY 2022

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Reviews 70 War Games 78 Captured! 80

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48

The Industrial Age sparked the development of weapons that didn’t require their wielders to be anywhere near the field of combat.

By Jon Guttman

As Hernán Cortés made his way to the Aztecan heart of Mexico, he met a people who could make or destroy him.

By Justin D. Lyons

The Olive Branch and the Sword

War by Remote

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62

The Combat of the Thirty

‘Die or Conquer’

A legion of hardened British veterans answered Simón Bolívar’s call for volunteers in South America.

By Jerome A. Long

In 1351 opposing hosts of knights and squires met on a Breton field of honor to test each other’s mettle.

By Michael G. Stroud

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What We Learned From...

General Fox Conner

20

Hardware Essex-class Aircraft Carrier

On the cover: SB2C-4 Helldivers from the carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10)—part of the Navy’s famed World War II Task Force 58—head toward Iwo Jima to support Marine invasion forces in February 1945. (Corbis/Getty Images)

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Hallowed Ground Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

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Join the discussion at militaryhistory.com MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN Chairman & Publisher

MAY 2022 VOL. 39, NO. 1

In 1675 Rhode Island colonists and Narragansett Indians kept a tenuous peace—until an invading English army dragged them all into war

By Douglas L. Gifford I N THE A R C H IV E S:

Samurai Invasion

Straddling a sea route between empires, the Western Pacific realm of Ryukyu ceded its sovereignty to Japan in 1609

By M.G. Haynes

Interview Respect for American veterans

is an inherited trait for actor Gary Sinise, who has spent long years serving those in uniform

Hardware Debuting in 1944, the V-1 flying bomb was the first of Germany’s proposed Vergeltungswaffen, or “retaliatory weapons.”

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Letters ‘Oops’ War [Re. “The ‘Oops’ War,” by Daniel McEwen, March 2022] The article certainly does not downplay the enormous cost of World War I, but the title struck a nerve with me. From what I’ve read, the interlocking set of alliances German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had set up made the war inevitable once the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lit the fuse. Without Bismarck at the helm, no one could control the series of events that drew the major powers into war. I would suggest that rather than referring to World War I as an “unfortunate accident,” one might better characterize it as an unintended war.

Bill Knowlton Colorado Springs, Colo.

Galloway

Thanks for that fine memorial on the death of Joe Galloway [News, March 2022]. Joe was fearless and always up front.

He was honest in his depiction of the soldiers’ condition in battle and felt honored to relate the stories of their selfless heroism in combat.

I thought of him as the Ernie Pyle of the Vietnam War.

But Joe and I differed on the issue of Vietnam. He believed the war was unwinnable, taking the horribly wrong Walter Cronkite narrative as gospel.

I prefer to follow North Vietnamese army Gen. Bùi Tín in his version of ground truth—that the 1968 Tet Offensive was a monumental mistake by North Vietnam any way one measures it (with military, political or psychological yardsticks) and that its losses were unacceptable, including destruction of the Viet Cong, the shattering of any offensive capability on the part of the NVA for four years and, most important, political turmoil in Hanoi.

In a postwar interview with The Wall Street Journal Bùi contended the United States lost the war because it failed to follow up on North Vietnam’s defeat in the Tet Offensive.

However, Galloway’s position on the war takes nothing away from his first-class service as the GIs’ reporter in Vietnam. He will be remembered by those with him at the point of the bayonet.

Col. Wayne Long U.S. Army (Ret.) Haverford, Pa.

I enjoyed “Generation Yank,”

by Peter Zablocki [January 2022]. However, I was surprised to find no mention of Cpl. Robert E. Krell, the Yank correspondent killed after jumping across the Rhine during Operation Varsity. Yank honored him with an obituary in its May 4, 1945, issue.

Krell earned his jump wings at Fort Benning, Ga., where he covered sports for the base newspaper, The Bayonet.

Among the teams he covered was the parachute school’s basketball squad, whose top player would become the nation’s top collegiate scorer for the 1943–44 season. Stanley “Whitey” von Nieda had been a standout forward at Penn State. Krell wrote numerous articles about Whitey’s outstanding play and nicknamed him the “Blond Bullet.” By season’s end Von Nieda had set a national record of 1,066 points scored in 44 games.

At season’s end Whitey transferred to Camp Mackall, N.C., where he was assigned to the 517th Airborne Signal Company of the 17th Airborne Division. Krell had established a personal relationship with Von Nieda, so when assigned by Yank to cover the “Talon Division’s” jump across the Rhine, he looked up the former basketball star. In fact, they spent the night before the jump together, trading dark humor jibes with each other as to what might happen if they were to be captured—Krell because of his Jewish background, and Whitey because of his aristocratic German

surname. No doubt Krell wanted to determine if his friend in the division commo shed (Whitey was a T-4 sergeant communications center clerk supporting the 17th’s command staff ) could help him get dispatches back to the publisher.

On March 24, 1945, Krell jumped as the last man in the lead aircraft of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment. However, the lead element’s aircraft dropped their paratroopers some 2 miles off course. It was in this confused situation that Krell was killed by small-arms fire.

Shortly after landing Krell had somehow managed to knock out an article describing the base camp in France prior to boarding. While the article failed to make the regular weekly issue of Yank, it did appear in the postwar anthology Yank: The GI Story of the War. Today Whitey Von Nieda, 99, is the oldest living alum of the National Basketball Association and of the 17th Airborne. Bob Krell’s body was repatriated in 1949 and laid to rest at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, N.Y. Krell’s tombstone memorializes his service with the 17th.

Col. Thomas C. Fosnacht U.S. Army Reserve (Ret.) Historian, American Legion Post 386 Hershey, Pa. Send letters via e-mail to

militaryhistory@historynet.com or to

Editor, Military History HISTORYNET 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor Arlington, VA 22203 Please include name, address and phone number

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News

Left to right: Alwyn Cashe, Christopher Celiz and Earl Plumlee are among the 3,511 recipients of the Medal of Honor.

By Dave Kindy

On July 12, 2018, as Celiz, his 75th Ranger Regt. team and partnered forces wrapped up a mission in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, the sergeant exposed himself to enemy fire to shield teammates loading a critically wounded soldier aboard a medevac helicopter. Shot while moving to shield the aircrew from fire, the mortally wounded Celiz selflessly motioned for the helicopter to depart the landing zone with the casualty.

On Aug. 28, 2013, when insurgents attacked his 1st Special Forces Group forward operating base in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, Plumlee rushed to its defense armed with his pistol. In close-quarters combat with insurgents, three of whom detonated suicide vests at close range, Plumlee killed several of the enemy, shielded teammates and pulled a critically wounded fellow soldier to safety. “I absolutely thought that I was going to die,” he said. Plumlee survived to receive his medal in person at the White House.

‘His place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat’ —President Theodore Roosevelt 8 MILITARY HISTORY MAY 2022

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Three American soldiers have received the Medal of Honor, joining 3,508 other soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen and coast guardsmen so honored since the Civil War. Sergeant 1st Class Alwyn Cashe, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Celiz and Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee were recognized for “gallantry above and beyond the call of duty” in Iraq and Afghanistan after having braved enemy fire to save wounded fellow soldiers. President Joe Biden awarded each a Medal of Honor at a Dec. 16, 2021, White House ceremony. Sadly, two of the awards were posthumous.

On Oct. 17, 2005, the Bradley fighting vehicle in which Cashe and his 15th Infantry Regiment platoon were traveling near Samarra, Iraq, was disabled and set afire by an improvised explosive device. With his fuel-soaked uniform on fire, Cashe returned to the flaming Bradley three times to extract six soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter. Severely burned in the effort, he died three weeks later.

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TRIO JOINS BROTHERHOOD OF THE MEDAL OF HONOR

Korean War Dead Honored

The National Park Service is adding a memorial wall to the Korean War Veterans Memorial, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Its 7-ton polished black granite slabs will bear the inscribed names of the estimated 45,000 Americans and Koreans in U.S. service who died in the war.

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pany—whose exploits inspired Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling 1992 nonfiction book Band of Brothers and the namesake 2001 HBO miniseries—participated in some of the key battles of World War II, from Normandy through the Battle of the Bulge. Forty-nine of his company mates were killed in action.

April 1, 1945

At the outset of the Battle of Okinawa the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s Task Force 58 (P. 22) provides bombardment support for landing forces and aerial attacks against enemy positions. The fleet’s fast carrier task groups formed the core of U.S. Navy forces in the Pacific.

Last Officer of the ‘Brothers’

Edward Shames, 99, the last surviving officer of Company E (aka the “Band of Brothers”), 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regt., 101st Airborne Division, died on Dec. 3, 2021. Shames’ com-

WAR RECORD

April 17, 1616

Napoléon Bonaparte’s garniture—a cased set of five engraved, relief-carved firearms and a gilt dress sword and scabbard presented to Bonaparte in 1797 by the Directory of the French Republic—hammered down for $2.87 million at Rock Island Auction’s latest Premier Firearms Auction, held at its Illinois facility and online [rockislandauction.com]. The gift was in gratitude for the general’s successful Italian campaign. Bonaparte wore the sword during the 1799 coup that swept him into power. On becoming emperor, he presented the garniture to Jean-Andoche Junot, Duke of Abrantes, a favorite general married to a dear friend of the Bonapartes. Junot’s 1813 death compelled his indebted widow to sell the cased set of arms. Napoléon’s own fortunes soon took a downturn, and he died in British captivity on St. Helena Island in 1821.

BATTLE PLAN DEPICTS DEFENSE OF WEST POINT Historic Deerfield, a Massachusetts museum dedicated to the history of the Connecticut River Valley, plans to display a recently rediscovered 1780 battle plan for the Continental Army’s defense of West Point.

Massachusetts-born Army engineer Moses Ashley drafted the plan for “His Excellency” George Washington in the wake of turncoat Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold’s foiled plot to surrender the fort to the British. Bearing pen-and-ink sketches of mounted soldiers, the roughly 17-by-26-inch document outlines the order of battle for units defending what today is the oldest continuously occupied military post in the United States.

Curators spotted the long-lost plan at a 2018 estate auction.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, first shogun of a unified Japan, dies on this date, according to the pre-Gregorian traditional calendar. Japanese still honor Tokugawa and peers Odu Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi as the “Great Unifiers” of Japan (P. 34).

April 30, 1341

John III, Duke of Brittany, dies without an heir, sparking the War of the Breton Succession. On March 26, 1351, amid a negotiated truce, rival French and English knights in the duchy engage in the Combat of Thirty (P. 56), a chivalric contest to the death.

May 22, 1521

Hernán Cortés deploys his army of Spaniards and Indian allies against Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztec empire.

Among his allies are the warriors of Tlaxcala (P. 48), arch enemies of the Aztecs, whom the Spanish won over by force and diplomacy.

May 24, 1822

The British Legions (P. 62) save the day at the Battle of Pichincha outside Quito, Ecuador, with a flanking attack against Spanish forces. Veterans of the Napoléonic wars, the legions fought for Simón Bolívar (and pay) in the South American wars of independence.

9

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News

McGee’s 409 combat missions rank him third overall among American pilots who’ve flown in three wars.

Charles Edward McGee, one of the last living pilots of the famed all-black Tuskegee Airmen, died at age 102 on Jan. 16, 2022. Though he broke racial barriers and flew an impressive 409 combat missions over three wars—137 during World War II, 100 in Korea and 172 in Vietnam—McGee never considered himself a hero. “I see myself,” he once said with trademark humility, “as one little American that did accomplish something that was helpful.”

During World War II McGee flew P-39Q Airacobras, P-47D Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs while escorting American bombers over Europe as a member of the “Red Tails,” the 302nd Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group in the U.S. Army Air Forces. He remained in P-51s while flying with the 67th Fighter Bomber Squadron in Korea, switching to RF-4 Phantom II jets while commanding the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron in Vietnam. His 409 combat missions rank him third overall among American pilots who’ve flown in three wars.

Rising steadily through the Air Force ranks, McGee retired as a colonel in 1973. His awards included the Legion of Merit with oak leaf cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters and the Air Medal with 25 oak leaf clusters. During his 2020 State of the Union Address President Donald Trump announced McGee’s honorary promotion to brigadier general before a packed, cheering house at the Capitol.

“One of the things we were fighting for was equality,” McGee once said of his wartime service.

“It was the Tuskegee Airmen that ended up with a stellar World War II aviation war record and thereby edged the military toward integration and America away from segregation.”

McGee is survived by his three children, 10 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild.

‘Discrimination, like a disease, must be attacked wherever it appears’ —President Harry S. Truman

Was Japanese Emperor Hirohito in favor of his government’s plans to attack the United States in late 1941? Historians have long contended he was reluctant to wage war. But according to a diary kept by the emperor’s grand chamberlain, Saburo Hyakutake, Hirohito had signed off on his ministers’ plans at least two months before the December 7 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The University of Tokyo obtained the diary in 2019 and recently made it available to the public.

Turks Unearth Roman Mask

Turkish archaeologists discovered a fragment of an elite Roman cavalryman’s protective iron face mask during recent excavations of the

ancient ruins of Hadrianopolis (in presentday Edirne), some 135 miles east of Istanbul. The mask turned up in what is believed to have been a third century Roman fortification amid the Hellenistic ruins. The region formed the core of the later Byzantine empire.

LEFT: STAFF SGT. VERNON YOUNG JR. (U.S. AIR FORCE); RIGHT: AHMET OZIER/ANADOLU AGENCY (GETTY IMAGES)

CHARLES McGEE, OLDEST TUSKEGEE AIRMAN, 102

Did Hirohito Want War?

10 MILITARY HISTORY MAY 2022

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News ANCHORS AWEIGH

Trust Has Saved 150 Battle Sites

offerings with a free video tour of Gettysburg [battlefields.org/learn/ video/guided-tourgettysburg-battlefield].

UDT-SEAL Site Now a Memorial Congress has designated the National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum, in Fort Pierce, Fla., as a national memorial site.

Opened in 1985, the museum occupies the training grounds of the U.S. Navy’s first school for Underwater Demolition Teams (aka “frogmen”), precursors of the present-day SEALs. Its artifacts and interactive exhibits relate the history of the teams, while a memorial wall bears the names of fallen UDTs and SEALs.

Since its 1775 founding the U.S. Navy has made history, as recent headlines attest:

Badger of Honor

WWII PILOTS HONORED 73 YEARS AFTER WIN

In 1949 a team of World War II veterans from the 332nd Fighter Group (aka Tuskegee Airmen) won the conventional class of the inaugural Fighter Gunnery Meet at Nevada’s Las Vegas Air Force Base (present-day Nellis AFB). The meet comprised aerial gunnery, skip bombing, rocket firing, strafing and dive bombing. But for years the Air Force Association listed the winning team—pilots Capt. Alva Temple and 1st Lts. James Harvey III, Harry Stewart and Halbert Alexander, and their crew chief, Staff Sgt. Buford A. Johnson—as “unknown.” The association corrected its omission in 1995, and recently the USAF Weapons School at Nellis installed a plaque affirming the team’s win. “We had a perfect score” recalled retired Lt. Col. Harvey, 98, who was on hand for the unveiling. “We were good.”

SEAL TEAM SIX FOUNDING CMDR. DICK MARCINKO, 81

Retired U.S. Navy Cmdr. Richard “Dick” Marcinko, a Vietnam veteran and the founding commander of SEAL Team Six, died on Christmas Day 2021. Marcinko enlisted in 1958, joined the UDTs in 1961 and shifted over to the SEALs in 1966. Deploying to Vietnam in 1967, he led the most successful SEAL raid of the war—a May 18 assault against the Viet Cong base on Ilo Island. In 1980, after the failed rescue attempt during the Iran hostage crisis, he started Team Six as a dedicated counterterrorism unit. Marcinko, whose awards included the Silver Star and four Bronze Stars with V device, related his exploits in the 1992 biography Rogue Warrior.

A bronze figure of a badger that graced the prow of the pre-dreadnought battleship USS Wisconsin will remain on public display at that state’s Capitol, in Madison. The U.S. Naval Academy Museum extended its loan of the statue another 50 years. The bronze bears the Wisconsin state motto, Forward, while the badger is the state mammal.

A Penny for Your Ships

The Navy sold Kitty Hawk and John F. Kennedy, the last of its conventionally powered (diesel-electric) supercarriers, for a penny each to a Texasbased shipbreaker, scrapping plans to turn the carriers into museum ships. Kitty Hawk saw service in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, while JFK served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ghost of a Chance

Orleck, a destroyer that saw combat in Korea and Vietnam, will continue life as a floating museum. Florida’s Jacksonville Naval Museum purchased the dilapidated “Gray Ghost of the Vietnam Coast” from a Texas entity and will refit the 77-year-old ship for future public visits.

Go for Broke

In December 2021 the Navy commissioned the destroyer Daniel Inouye, named after the late Hawaiian-born U.S. senator, World War II veteran and Medal of Honor recipient. Inouye, of JapaneseAmerican ancestry, served in the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, from which the ship borrows its motto—“Go for Broke.”

TOP: U.S. AIR FORCE; BOTTOM: BILL TIERNAN/VIRGINIAN-PILOT (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Since 1987 the American Battlefield Trust (ABT) has spared from development more than 54,000 acres—an area larger than Seattle—at 150 historic battlefields nationwide. The latest acreage purchased by ABT abuts Virginia’s Great Bridge Battlefield, where on Dec. 9, 1775, Virginia militiamen prevailed over British troops, forcing the departure of John Murray (aka Lord Dunmore), Virginia’s last colonial governor. The trust has also expanded its online

12 MILITARY HISTORY MAY 2022

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Interview Hope in the Ranks

By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

Were there any particularly poignant letters?

Linda Hope Linda Hope is the eldest daughter of legendary comedian Bob Hope. A producer and writer, she worked with her father for many years and produced the Emmy Award–winning 1993 TV special Bob Hope: The First 90 Years. With co-author Martha Bolton she recently published Dear Bob: Bob Hope’s Wartime Correspondence With the GIs of World War II, which received the 2021 Golden Scroll Award for memoir of the year from the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association. The book shares a sampling of many thousands of personal letters that Bob and the troops exchanged. Military History interviewed Hope about the book and memories of her father’s experiences entertaining soldiers of the “Greatest Generation” around the globe during World War II.

One of the things that comes to mind was when I went with him on the Queen Elizabeth 2 to celebrate the 50th anniversary. There were these wonderful older men (in their 70s and 80s) who would bring old, somewhat faded photos with Dad in the very far distance to share with him. That people would keep these photographs for all those years just to have him sign them if and when the opportunity arose—Dad and I were just so touched they kept them and considered them among their treasures and keepsakes. It is additional confirmation of the depth of his connection to the troops.

Why was your father known as “the soldier’s best friend”?

It was because his material was so geared to them individually, in small groups and specifically to their area. He had a sense of who they were and what they were going through, and he was a friendly guy. He went to the mess halls and places where the troops would congregate. He would interact with them and exchange stories and talk about their families and friends. The fact he was willing to take some very big risks to be with them, in often remote places, made them feel as though people back home were remembering them and their sacrifices.

He was very important to them as a morale builder, as well as a reminder of home and what they were fighting for.

Did he ever test his comedy material on the family?

Truthfully, no. I was born in 1939. Obviously, I really don’t remember letters to mother or us from him. I don’t think he had much time for letter writing, not to mention I’m sure he was aware of the time it took to get a letter to get back to the States in those days.

Actually, that was his style. He would run material by the family at dinner throughout his career. I am sure he did the same to some extent during World War II, though because he fashioned each monologue to incorporate as much local color as possible, he wasn’t able to run everything by the family. In addition, remember, the military did not always let him know where he and his troop of entertainers would be going.

Why did he travel the world entertaining U.S. troops?

Which fellow entertainers did he most like to tour with?

He never made a statement to me or the family. However, he would say in all kinds of small ways what it meant to see the guys, to be there with them and to go out to them where they were serving.

Dad truly loved all the men and women willing to give of their time and talent to help him entertain the troops. I know he had a particularly fun time with Phyllis Diller, who made many trips with him.

Do you recall any of your father’s letters home?

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CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)

What motivated me was the 75th anniversary of World War II. Dad was very involved in the 50th, and I thought this would be a good way to represent not only him, but also the men and women he corresponded with over those years.

He felt like a bridge between the soldiers and their families or loved ones at home.

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

Why did you put your father’s wartime letters into a book?

Bob Hope corresponded with many of the GIs he entertained during World War II and was later named an honorary veteran for his long service.

During World War II there were Frances Langford, Jerry Colonna, Patty Thomas and Tony Romano, his one-man band.

They were the ones who went to all the hot spots. Remember, travel was not like it is today, not to mention their accommodations were tents and hastily puttogether locations for them to relax.

How did your mom feel about him traveling to conflict zones?

CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

Like any military wife, she was very concerned for his safety, and since she was a very good Catholic, she lit a lot of candles and said a lot of prayers. However, she emphasized with her children that what Dad was doing was important, and that it was something he was uniquely gifted to do. My mother always told us when we would complain about Dad’s absence that he would be coming home in the next few weeks, whereas so many other boys and girls had no idea when their fathers or brothers would return.

was clear how starved the military audience was for entertainment and what an exceptional audience they were. He was used to small studio audiences. Suddenly, here were thousands of guys, and once he heard the roar of their laughter, he was hooked. He also realized he had been given a gift, and he felt it was something he was meant to do. This was confirmed to him by President [Franklin] Roosevelt.

In 1997 Congress made your father an honorary veteran of all U.S. armed forces. How meaningful was that to him?

He used to say that to be included among the men and women who gave so much for the country he loved was one of the most important honors he ever received.

get part of it back, would help us through these difficult and divisive times.

The impact my dad had on the families of the servicemen and servicewomen is in some ways even more significant today. It wouldn’t truly be understood until years later when the children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of the soldiers proudly related stories of their parent or grandparent having met Dad. Those moments became part of their own family history.

One of the significant legacies the families share is about how Dad would relay messages to loved ones on return to the States. At a time when hearing anything from loved ones in the military was rare and often impossible, Dad would relay messages that became known as “the day Bob Hope called.”

Why is it important to remember your father’s wartime legacy?

Do you have other memories More than ever the spirit of that gen- of your father you’d like to eration, aka the “Greatest Generation,” share with our readers? is something we need today. The willing-

I would just honestly encourage them

others seems to have been lost. The generosity of spirit of those World War II days is something that, if we could even

they will learn about the spirit of the men and women who sacrificed, including my Dad. MH

Did he regret not having served? ness to give of ourselves for the good of to read the book, Dear Bob, because He wanted to sign up. But when he entertained the military for the first time— at March Field, Calif., on May 6, 1941—it

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Valor Taking Charge on Leyte

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 14, 1917, Francis Brown Wai grew up living the American Dream. His father, Kim Wai, had emigrated from China and become a successful banker, while mother Rosina was a native Hawaiian. Educated at Honolulu’s elite Punahou prep school, Francis earned athletic letters in track, football and baseball by the time he graduated in 1935. After two years at California’s Sacramento Junior College, he transferred to UCLA, from which the four-sport athlete graduated in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

As war clouds gathered, Wai enlisted in the Hawaii National Guard, which sent him to the U.S. Army’s Officer Candidate School, at Fort Benning, Ga. On Sept. 27, 1941, he was commissioned a second lieutenant—a rare feat for an American of Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry. Assigned as an intelligence officer in Headquarters Company, 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, Capt. Wai was in Oahu when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, and shipped to Australia with the division in 1943.

In April 1944 the division participated in Operation Reckless, the seizure of Hollandia, Papua New Guinea, an Allied victory that eliminated all Japanese forces east of the base. Wai’s reinforced 34th Infantry helped capture Biak Island.

Once that springboard was secured in August, the 24th Infantry Division was attached to X Corps for the opening move in Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s promised return to the Philippines—the October 20 landing on Leyte Island.

The 34th Infantry came ashore at Palo, or Red Beach. Landing in the fifth wave, Wai was shocked by what he found. The first four waves of troops were pinned down on the beachhead, leaderless and disorganized due to heavy casualties among their officers. Between them and frontline Japanese defensive positions amid palm groves there was virtually no cover, only an intervening stretch of low-lying rice paddies.

Assuming command of everyone within earshot, Wai, seeing little alternative, led an assault party forward, practically daring the enemy to fire at him. In doing

Francis B. Wai U.S. Army Medal of Honor Leyte, Philippines Oct. 20, 1944

just that, the Japanese gunners gave away their positions, allowing the captain and his team to pinpoint and eliminate the enemy. While leading an attack on the last remaining pillbox in the grove, however, Wai’s luck ran out, its defenders killing him before they themselves were overrun. According to a subsequent posthumous citation, “Capt. Wai’s courageous, aggressive leadership inspired the men, even after his death, to advance and destroy the enemy.” By late afternoon Red Beach was securely in American hands.

At 6 p.m. that day a burial detail interred Wai in a makeshift American military cemetery in Palo. Repatriated in 1949, his remains were reinterred with full military honors that September 8 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (aka the “Punchbowl”) in Honolulu. Wai’s parents and 100 relatives and friends were in attendance.

In the wake of Wai’s actions on Red Beach his regimental commander, Col. Aubrey Newman, had recommended the hard-charging captain for a posthumous Medal of Honor, but the Army instead had awarded Wai the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1996, however, allegations of past prejudicial treatment of Asian American service members led Congress to direct the Army to review the records. As a result the branch upgraded 22 DSCs granted to Asian Americans to Medals of Honor. All but two were granted to Japanese Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion. One of the two went to Rudolph D. Davila, a Texan of Spanish-Filipino descent, for his heroism at Anzio, Italy, in May 1944. The other went to Wai. On June 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton presented Robert Wai the Medal of Honor on behalf of his late brother Francis—the only American of Chinese ancestry yet to have received the United States’ highest medal for valor. MH

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; INSET: CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR SOCIETY

By Jon Guttman

16 MILITARY HISTORY MAY 2022

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

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HALLER’S MEN IN BLUE

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

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santa fe trail

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commemorating america’s first commercial highway

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What We Learned From...

General Fox Conner

By David T. Zabecki

F

ox Conner (1874–1951) was among the most influential American generals of World War II, despite having retired from active duty in 1938, three years before the United States entered the war. One of the Army’s most senior officers during World War I and the interwar years, Conner mentored several leading generals of World War II. His protégés included George Marshall, George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower. Throughout the war that trio regularly wrote the retired Conner, outlining their plans and seeking his advice.

During World War I Connor was the operations officer (G-3) of Gen. John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. Conner monitored closely as Marshall, the G-3 of the 1st Division, planned and coordinated the successful May 28, 1918, attack on the German position at Cantigny. It was the first division-sized American attack of the war. On the heels of that battle Conner had Marshall transferred to the AEF staff as his assistant G-3. As American forces continued to arrive in France, the First Army was established in August 1918 as the primary U.S. fighting headquarters. Conner sent Marshall to the First Army as its G-3. Coordinating closely with Conner at AEF, Marshall went on to plan the great Allied victories at Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. In the interwar years Conner continued to support Marshall’s career advancement. As the former approached retirement in 1938, he worked tirelessly behind the scenes to support Army Chief of Staff Gen. Malin Craig’s efforts to ensure Marshall would succeed him in office.

Conner met Patton in 1913 and they became lifelong friends, the senior-ranking Conner often playing the older brother role. In April 1917 both were on the AEF advance staff that traveled to England with Pershing (above, front and center). In the interwar years Conner intervened to prevent Patton’s abrasive nature from damaging his career. When Conner took command of the Hawaiian Department in 1927, Patton was the intelligence officer (G-2), though he had been reassigned from the position of divisional G-3 due to his personality. Conner worked to keep Patton under control.

Lessons: Never fight unless you have to.

The 2003–11 Iraq War, aka Operation Iraqi Freedom, was clearly a war of choice rather than one of necessity.

Never fight for long. Neither the Vietnam War nor the war in Afghanistan had clear strategic objectives, and both lasted far too long due to mission creep.

Never fight alone. NATO was meant to ensure the United States would never again fight by itself, but its members didn’t support the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. During the post-invasion phase of the Iraq War the United Kingdom was the only significant NATO ally that stood with the United States. MH

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Fox Conner mentored several officers who proved vital to the U.S. effort in World War II.

Conner is best remembered, however, as “the man who made Eisenhower.” In 1920 Eisenhower’s friend Patton introduced him to Conner. A year later, when the newly promoted brigadier general needed an executive officer for his 20th Infantry Brigade in Panama, Conner tapped Eisenhower. According to Ike, his two years under Conner were the most profound period of his military education. Conner introduced Eisenhower to the principles of precise and methodical staff work. He also required his exec to read Carl von Clausewitz’s On War and introduced him to such authors as Plato, Tacitus and Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1925 Conner got Eisenhower a slot in the General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. A year later his protégé finished first in his class. Eisenhower later referred to Conner as “the ablest man I ever knew.”

Conner impressed on Eisenhower three principal strategic war-fighting imperatives. Unfortunately, some of the United States’ military actions following World War II have fallen short of one or more of these imperatives.

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Hardware Essex-class Aircraft Carrier

By Jon Guttman Illustration by Tony Bryan

13 10 9 6

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No longer bound by construction limitations imposed by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, the United States designed the class to steam faster, carry more and heavier aircraft, and better protect itself. From the time Essex (CV-9) and sister ship Yorktown (CV-10), with the light carrier Independence (CVL-22), launched their first strike, against Marcus Island on Aug. 31, 1943, the class proved able to survive tremendous punishment—most dramatically demonstrated in 1945 by the

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battle-damaged Franklin (CV-13) and Bunker Hill (CV-17).

The class was also adaptable to a series of improvements, including lengthened decks on several carriers. Air groups initially totaled 90 aircraft per carrier, 36 of which were fighters, 36 dive bombers and 18 torpedo bombers. By December 1944 the composition had changed to 73 fighters (four of which were radar-equipped Grumman F6F-5N Hellcat or Vought F4U-2 Corsair night fighters), 15 dive bombers (with fighters also shouldering that role) and 15 torpedo bombers. Though the built-in deck catapults saw little use at first, up-armored planes required the carriers to launch up to 40 percent of their aircraft by 1945.

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Radio mast Catapult Oerlikon 20 mm single gun mounts Forward elevator Dual 5-inch/38-caliber gun mounts Mark 51 fire-control directors Bofors 40 mm quad gun mounts Navigating bridge Flag plot Pilothouse Primary flight-control station

12. Mark 37 fire-control directors 13. Mark 4 tracking radar 14. SK surveillance radar 15. SG surface-search radar 16. YE radar 17. SC-2 surveillance radar 18. Funnel 19. Aft elevator 20. Hangar deck fire curtains 21. Hangar deck 22. Single 5-inch/38-caliber gun mounts

23. Four-blade propellers and shafts (four total) 24. No. 2 engine room 25. No. 4 fire (boiler) room 26. Boiler uptake casings 27. No. 3 fire room 28. No. 1 engine room 29. No. 2 fire room 30. No. 1 fire room 31. Deck edge elevator 32. Flight deck

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28 More Essex-class ships were built than any other carrier class in history, with 14 of the 24 completed contributing significantly to the Allied campaign in the Pacific and the attendant destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Some served on in Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War, with the space program and in training roles. The last of the class to retire, in 1991, was Lexington (CV-16), the onetime flagship of Task Force 58 (see P. 22). Surviving examples serve as museum ships—Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, S.C.; Intrepid (CV-11) in New York City; Hornet (CV-12) in Alameda, Calif.; and Lexington in Corpus Christi, Texas. MH FROM U.S. NAVY AIRCRAFT CARRIERS, 1942–45 (NEW VANGUARD NO. 130), BY MARK STILLE (OSPREY PUBLISHING, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING)

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Essex-class Aircraft Carrier

Propulsion: Four sets of Westinghouse steam turbines, with eight Babcock & Wilcox oil-fired boilers, producing 150,000 shaft horsepower Length: 872 feet (888 feet for long hull) Beam: 93 feet Draft (full load): 27 feet 6 inches Displacement (standard): 30,800 tons Displacement (full load): 36,380 tons (short hull) or 46,380 tons (long hull) Maximum speed: 33 knots Range: 20,000 nautical miles at 15 knots Complement: 2,600–3,400 men

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D N A FAST S U O I FUR Nimitz, s a s n o ic l a v a n n rica Led by such Ame ey, innovative fast carrier ls Spruance and Ha decisive in the Pacific War d task groups prove bins b

By Michael W. Ro

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Vessels of the U.S. Navy’s Fast Carrier Task Force (Task Force 38/58) maneuver off the Japanese home islands on Aug. 17, 1945, two days after Emperor Hirohito announced his nation’s surrender in a radio broadcast. Below right is the carrier Wasp (CV-18). This formation included five other Essex-class carriers in addition to supporting battleships, cruisers and destroyers.

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The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, wreaked havoc on the Pacific Fleet but missed the ships that would prove vital to the U.S. counterattack—the aircraft carriers.

T

the Navy had few opportunities to mount an effective offense while waiting for American industry to produce ships, aircraft and weaponry. Still, the Navy had important assets. One was its cryptology department at Pearl Harbor, known as “Station Hypo,” which despite being understaffed and underfunded had been deciphering the IJN’s main communications code, JN-25, since 1940. Driven hard by Hypo’s director, Lt. Cmdr. Joseph J. Rochefort, the code breakers were able to unravel enough Japanese transmissions to furnish key intelligence to Navy brass by early 1942.

The import of their work was proved in the Battle of the Coral Sea, southeast of New Guinea. In April Adm. Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations, requested an assessment of Japanese

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TOP AND LEFT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2); RIGHT: CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)

Despite such proof of aircraft carriers’ effectiveness, senior American naval officers remained generally convinced the battleship was the dominant weapon at sea.

Its adherents were known as the “gun club.” The sea power doctrine of naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan dominated 20th century military thinking at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and the Naval War College, in Newport, R.I. The conflict between the “battleship admirals” and the generally younger generation of “aviation admirals” continued for the duration of the war.

Facing the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy initially played a weak hand. Fielding just four serviceable carriers with inferior aircraft, with the battleships damaged in Hawaii months from being serviceable,

PREVIOUS SPREAD AND THIS PAGE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)

he United States was inexorably drawn into the Pacific War, and indeed World War II, by Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Well-trained Japanese naval aviators from the carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku attacked in two waves, sending four battleships to the bottom, sinking or damaging many other ships, destroying or damaging more than 300 aircraft and killing some 2,400 American servicemen. The attack demonstrated the combat range of modern aircraft carriers and the vulnerability of traditional surface warships. Within days Britain’s vaunted Royal Navy lost its newest battleship, Prince of Wales, and its consort battlecruiser, Repulse, to Japanese air attacks off the coast of Malaya.

The lessons of such actions were not lost on Rear Adm. Chester Nimitz, whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly promoted to admiral and appointed to command the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Nimitz reorganized the fleet into four task forces centered on the carriers Lexington, Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown. The admiral then planned counteroffensive carrier raids against the Japanese, the most dramatic of which was the April 18, 1942, bomber strike on the Japanese home islands by 16 B-25s launched one-way at extreme long range from Hornet.

Hornet’s commander, Capt. Marc. A. “Pete” Mitscher, was a pioneering Navy flier and aggressive fighter who went on to command Task Force 38/58, arguably the most powerful armada in military history.

TOP AND LEFT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2); RIGHT: CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)

PREVIOUS SPREAD AND THIS PAGE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)

Having escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor, the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2) meets its end on May 8, 1942, during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Below left: The crew of a rescue ship haul aboard surviving Lexington crewmen. Below: Capt. Marc Mitscher watches as Lt. Col. James Doolittle takes off in the lead B-25B from Hornet (CV-8) for his April 18, 1942, raid on Japan.

strategic intentions. Rochefort responded that an enemy attack on Port Moresby, in Papua, New Guinea, was likely imminent. Nimitz responded by sending Yorktown and Lexington to the Coral Sea. The ensuing fight, in early May, was history’s first carrier-on-carrier engagement and was riddled with mishaps. Each side lost a carrier—Lexington and Shoho—leaving the outcome something of a draw.

Giving up their attempt to take Port Moresby, the Japanese focused on tiny Midway, the westernmost of the inhabited Hawaiian Islands. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the IJN’s Combined Fleet, was determined to destroy the remnants of the U.S. Pacific Fleet that had escaped destruction at Pearl, especially the aircraft carriers.

Hoping to lure those carriers into a fatal trap, he devised a surprise attack on the American base at Midway with a strike force centered on four of the carriers—Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu and Soryu—that had attacked Pearl Harbor.

An avid poker player, Yamamoto went into action believing he held all the aces, but things did not go his way.

Rochefort’s cryptanalysts learned the target and approximate date of the attack, the complete Japanese order of battle and the likely location of the attacking fleet. On June 3 the

pilot of a Consolidated PBY Catalina scout plane spotted the approaching enemy invasion fleet.

The news galvanized Nimitz, who dispatched his three carriers—Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown—to an assembly point northeast of Midway. With Vice Adm. William “Bull” Halsey hospitalized at Pearl with an infection, Nimitz put

Coral Sea, history’s first carrier-on-carrier battle, was riddled with mishaps Rear Adm. Raymond Spruance in charge of Enterprise and Hornet, with Rear Adm. Frank Fletcher over Yorktown and in overall command. The approaching Japanese fleet under Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo was unaware of the proximity of the American carriers and launched more than 100 aircraft to attack Midway early on June 4. Simultaneously the Midway forces dispatched all available combat planes to attack the Japanese. In the ensuing aerial melee most of those attackers

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Chester Nimitz Raymond Spruance

John McCain were shot down. While Nagumo’s fliers did moderate damage to island installations, they lost 11 aircraft and sustained heavy damage to scores of others from the intense antiaircraft fire. To wreak a more destructive raid, Nagumo ordered his carrier commanders to rearm and change armaments on the Japanese planes—a time-consuming task.

Meanwhile, Fletcher had Enterprise and Hornet steam in the direction of the Japanese fleet to reduce distance to the targets. In consultation with Halsey’s chief of staff, Capt.

Miles Browning, Spruance ordered an all-out launch while still at long range from Nagumo’s carriers, and Fletcher soon followed suit from Yorktown. Browning figured there was a good chance of catching the Japanese rearming and refueling, and he was right. Three squadrons of obsolete Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers were shot down or turned back without scoring a single hit before the task force’s Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers saved the day. Striking when the Japanese decks were jammed with aircraft, bombs, torpedoes and fuel lines, the SBDs hit and mortally damaged Akagi,

After Midway combat in the Pacific devolved into a series of skirmishes as each side built up its surface fleets and aerial forces. In early August 1942 a surprise amphibious landing by the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal, Tulagi and neighboring islands in the Solomons sparked weeks of hard fighting on land and sea with heavy losses.

The sea battle—which involved the carriers Wasp (struck by three Japanese torpedoes, abandoned and scuttled), Saratoga and Enterprise (both heavily damaged and sent to Pearl for repairs)—was costly on both sides. For a time the newly arrived Hornet was the lone operational U.S. fleet carrier in the Pacific, before it too was sunk, leaving the soon repaired Enterprise as the sole operational American fleet carrier. The Japanese nearly recaptured Guadalcanal, but it ultimately remained in U.S. hands.

In 1943 the balance of naval power shifted to the Americans as the Essex-class carriers and their improved aircraft arrived in the Central Pacific under Nimitz’s command.

Major U.S. shipyards worked around the clock, launching some Essex-class flattops in only 16 months. Six were commissioned in 1943 and seven more in 1944. The new carriers featured improved radar and communications. Each bore

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TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

Marc Mitscher

Soryu and Kaga. Hours later another two dozen dive bombers converged on and pummeled Hiryu, which eventually sank.

In one afternoon the U.S. Navy’s three-carrier strike force had changed the course of the Pacific War. Japan lost four of its fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, some 250 attack aircraft and many of its best aircrews at the cost of Yorktown. Yamamoto ordered a retreat that night. The withdrawal marked the effective end of his drive to deliver a knockout blow to the U.S. Navy, leaving the IJN to face a naval war of attrition against the aroused industrial might of the United States.

The American victory at Midway had other consequences. The first was an urgent drive to upgrade all carrier aircraft, including the introduction of fighters able to best Japan’s A6M Zero. Grumman responded within months by rolling out the first production model F6F Hellcat. It could outrun, outclimb and outshoot the Zero, reach a higher operational ceiling, and it better protected pilots with armor and a self-sealing gas tank. The first combatready F6Fs reached the Pacific Fleet in February 1943.

It proved the best carrier-based fighter of the war.

Grumman also produced an exemplary carrier-based torpedo bomber, the TBF-1 Avenger. While the dependable Dauntless remained the mainstay dive-bomber, CurtissWright launched a more powerful carrier-based bomber, the SB2C Helldiver, though it was plagued with early problems and did not reach operational status until late 1943.

At the outset of the war Congress had appropriated funds to build additional aircraft carriers, resulting in the construction and launching of 13 Essex-class flattops, the 27,100-ton workhorses of the soon to be overpowering Pacific task forces. These were to be accompanied by dozens of escort (or “Jeep”) carriers carrying smaller complements of aircraft.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMANDS (5)

William Halsey

TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMANDS (5)

Deployed in September 1943, the Grumman F6F Wildcat proved more than a match for the Japanese Zero and quickly became the dominant carrier-borne fighter in the Pacific.

36 fighters, 36 dive bombers and 18 torpedo bombers. The carriers also bristled with antiaircraft guns: a dozen turretmounted 5-inch guns with a range of 10 miles, as many as 18 quad-mounted 40 mm Bofors guns and upward of fiftyfive 20 mm Oerlikon cannons. In this industrial/weapons race, it was already clear in 1943 that Japan could not keep pace with U.S. shipbuilding. Moreover, given the nature of its extensive pilot training, Japan would be unable to replace its hemorrhaging losses of thousands of first-rate pilots.

In 1943 a new American doctrine of carrier-based warfare split naval assets in the Pacific into two large fleets: the Third (in the South Pacific under Halsey) and the Seventh (in the Southwest Pacific under General Douglas MacArthur). In 1944 the Third formed the basis of the Fifth Fleet (in the Central Pacific under Spruance), the fleet designation and command toggling back and forth between Spruance and Halsey. Most new fleet carriers and Independence-class light carriers were assigned to the Central Pacific. That summer Essex and the new Yorktown and Lexington arrived at Pearl Harbor along with the light carriers Independence, Princeton and Belleau Wood. Here began the multicarrier task groups that, as naval historian Clark

G. Reynolds explained in his definitive 1968 book The Fast Carriers, formed the “principal offensive element” that would attack the Japanese-held Gilbert and Marshall islands.

Recognizing the vulnerability of a task force built around one or two carriers, the new doctrine posited deploying three to six fleet carriers at the center of a circular formation, ringed by cruisers and destroyers bristling with antiaircraft guns, and escort carriers, each carrying 30 attack aircraft, accompanied by the newest fast battleships with speed to match the carriers. The main offensive weapon of these task forces was their 500-1,100 attack aircraft, able to range out to 1,500 miles.

The innovative offensive doctrine

Sara’s Ensign In August 1943 Saratoga (CV-3) became the core of the newly designated Task Force 38. The ship saw extensive action, and though twice torpedoed and hit by kamikazes, it survived World War II. In 1946 it was sunk by an atomic bomb during the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon tests.

under which the new fast carrier task groups would operate was essentially created by then Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher.

In late January 1944 Mitscher prepared to launch Operation Flintlock, the battle to take the Japanese stronghold of

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Kwajalein in the Marshalls. By then his fleet was operating as Task Force 58 (TF 58) and comprised a dozen carriers in four task groups of three carriers each, with a combined complement of 650 attack aircraft.

The Battle of Kwajalein began on January 31 with aerial assaults and the bombardment of its defenses by battleships and destroyers. By noon the carrier fighters had cleared the skies of Japanese aircraft.

Marine and Army forces landed on February 1. After three days of fighting and relentChange is inevitable.

The U.S. Navy admirals less air attacks the island was in American who clung to battleships hands. So too was the vast anchorage at adjacent Majuro Atoll, which became the new rather than admit the growing value of aircraft forward base for the Central Pacific fleet. carriers failed to realize From Majuro TF 58 moved in mid-February the evolutionary nature to attack Truk, the heavily fortified “Gibraltar of naval warfare. of the Pacific” and capital of the Carolines.

War is a team effort.

As Reynolds wrote in The Fast Carriers: The fast carrier task

Tactical Takeaways

groups were vital to the Allied victory in the Pacific but would not have prevailed without those who built the harbors and kept the supply lines open.

Navies are essential.

As most of the world’s surface is water, a robust naval presence is vital for leading nations.

A predawn-launched 72-plane fighter sweep on 17 February opened the air attack against “impregnable” Truk.…About 80 Japanese planes and heavy, inaccurate flak challenged Mitscher’s sweep, but only half the Zeros sought to engage. For most of the morning the air battle raged, resulting in the loss of 50 Zeros and four Hellcats.…The carrier planes then strafed the parked aircraft on three strips and destroyed or damaged about 150 in all, leaving another 100 undamaged.…The bombers went directly to work and had a field day. Before Task Force 58 left Truk, about 140,000 tons of enemy shipping lay sunken or piled up on the beach.…One aviator who observed this handiwork pointed out: “This is how we can win battles in the future. Teamwork is the answer.”

Opposite: Visible from Ticonderoga are (top, left to right) Wasp, Yorktown, Hornet and Hancock, at anchor in Ulithi, the Navy’s western Pacific staging area in the last year of the war. The bell of the second Yorktown (CV-10, middle left). The first Yorktown (CV-5, middle right) smolders after being bombed at Midway; it sank on June 7, 1942. TF 58 crewmen (bottom) cheer the downing of enemy aircraft in the Marianas in 1944.

THIS PAGE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: U.S. NAVY; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2); ELECTRIC EGG (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Led by the light carrier Langley, the ships of Task Group 38.3—one of four TF 38 subgroups—enter Ulithi anchorage in the Caroline Islands in 1944.

Indeed, the Truk attacks served as prototypes for TF 58’s 1944 and ’45 victories over Japanese air forces and their many island bases. Key American advantages enabled those wins. Surprise was often a factor, thanks to the task force’s unprecedented mobility—and thanks to the fact the Japanese never realized their naval code had been broken.

Japanese pilots diminished in proficiency, as many of their initial elite flyers were lost by 1944, and their substitutes were no match for veteran American pilots.

As a growing number of U.S. carriers and battleships arrived in the Pacific, the Navy’s success in neutralizing Japanese strongholds in the Marshalls and Carolinas opened the way to all-out attacks on the Marianas—Tinian, Saipan, Guam and Rota. That island group’s strategic importance loomed large: American air bases on those islands would enable the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber—with its 3,250-mile range and ability to carry up to 10 tons of bombs—to rain destruction on the Japanese home islands.

Code-named Operation Forager, the 1944 assault on the Marianas proved decisive, and its chief weapon was TF 58.

It was at that point King split the fleet into two commands— one to strike, the other to plan. The same powerful fast carrier task force known as TF 58 in the Fifth Fleet under Spruance and Mitscher was called TF 38 in the Third Fleet under Halsey and Vice Adm. John McCain. The flip-flopping designation understandably confused the Japanese. In June TF 58 steamed toward the Marianas with 15 flattops carrying more than 900 aircraft, seven battleships, 20-odd cruisers and dozens of destroyers. The Americans would employ that mighty armada just in the preparation of the Marianas landings.

The total didn’t include the scores of ships that would transport nearly 130,000 Marine and Army troops to the beaches.

Mitscher kicked off Forager on June 11 by sending some 200 F6F Hellcats to ravage Japanese air bases on Saipan. That strike kicked off a week of carrier-based raids, followed by a two-day bombardment. The initial landing took place on June 15, some 20,000 Marines making it ashore that day.

Desperate to hang on to the Marianas, Japanese Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa mustered his entire 1st Mobile Fleet —five battleships and nine carriers, including the newly launched Taiho, Ozawa’s flagship—to counterattack in what is remembered as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the largest carrier-on-carrier engagement of the war. Mitscher and Ozawa each perceived it as an opportunity to destroy his enemy’s main Pacific fleet.

As the Japanese fleet approached Saipan from the west, U.S. submarines tracked and reported its progress. Ozawa

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THIS PAGE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: U.S. NAVY; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2); ELECTRIC EGG (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Carrier Task Force Prevails

Operating alternately as Task Force 58 in the U.S. Fifth Fleet under Mitscher and Spruance and Task Force 38 in the Third Fleet under Halsey and McCain, the Fast Carrier Task Force was the mighty armada that spearheaded the victorious island-hopping campaign in the Pacific Theater.

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Turning the Tables at Midway

On June 4, 1942, tipped off by U.S. code breakers to the Japanese approach, Enterprise, Yorktown and Hornet sent all available combat planes to intercept the enemy fleet. American dive bombers ultimately managed to mortally damage all four enemy carriers, each of which had been at Pearl.

Carriers Absent From Pearl

On Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. Pacific Fleet carriers Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga were at sea when aircraft from the Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, clearly demonstrating the lethality of carriers.

Fast Carrier Task Force Forms

By the outset of 1944 the fast carrier task group doctrine developed by Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher was ready to be implemented. Operating for the first time as Task Force 58, his fleet comprised four task groups of three carriers each. Their 650 total combat aircraft proved pivotal in the Marshalls.

Carriers at War

I

n the interwar period carriers developed an attack capability rivaling that of the great battleships that projected sea power in World War I. But as improvements in aviation technology allowed for more accurate air strikes from ever greater ranges, carriers proved more lethal and became the dominant force at sea, particularly in the Pacific Theater of World War II. It was fortunate for the United States, then, that all three carriers of its Pacific Fleet were absent from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, during the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack that drew the Americans into the war. While the first carrier-on-carrier duel, in the Coral Sea in May 1942, was inconclusive, the U.S. victory at Midway that June, in which the Japanese lost four of their fleet carriers, turned the tide of the war and validated the carrier’s tactical value. MH

MAP BY GENE THORP (CARTOGRAPHIC CONCEPTS, INC.)

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Isoroku Yamamoto

Caught in Japan’s Inland Sea on March 19, 1945, the outsize battleship Yamato successfully evades the bombs of attacking TF 58 aircraft.

opened the fight around 10 a.m. on June 19, launching the first of four waves of 373 carrier-based aircraft. American radar operators spotted them 100 miles out, and Mitscher sent every Hellcat he had—nearly 300—screaming into the air. The Japanese pilots were outmatched, and the greatest naval air battle of the war was a slaughter, dubbed by one jubilant American flier as “an old-time turkey shoot.” It

Only when Japan surrendered did Nimitz halt all combat operations for the fast carrier task groups was over by 3 p.m. Ozawa lost two-thirds of his aircraft.

Mitscher lost 20 Hellcats.

That same day U.S. submarines made the victory even more lopsided by torpedoing and sinking two Japanese fleet carriers, Shokaku and Taiho. It was a portent of things to come in the Pacific. American submarines armed with improved torpedoes played a growing role in destroying not only IJN assets but also merchant ships carrying oil and other strategic materials.

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Chuichi Nagumo

raids and invasions of minor islands in the Marianas and elsewhere. The next major battle, for the Leyte Gulf in late October, marked the opening of the MacArthurdriven campaign to liberate the Philippines. Leyte proved history’s last battleship-on-battleship fight, as well as the largest naval battle in modern history in numbers of warships engaged—more than 280, including the ships of Halsey’s Third Fleet. It also marked the end of the IJN as an offensive fighting force.

Ominously, the Battle of Leyte Gulf also saw the first organized attacks by Japanese kamikaze (“divine wind”) aircraft. As most of their veteran aircrews had perished, the IJN instead trained its young green pilots to crash into Allied warships. In the fight for the Philippines the kamikazes represented a serious threat, sinking the escort carrier St. Lo and damaging the fleet carriers Essex, Franklin, Hancock, Intrepid and Lexington, the light carriers Belleau Wood and Cabot, and more than a half dozen escort carriers, all of which retired for repairs. The only real defense against such attacks was accurate and relentless antiaircraft fire—but against dozens, even hundreds, of kamikazes it would never be 100 percent effective.

With the Marianas in American hands by year’s end, and the battle to liberate the Philippines well underway, the next islands to be contested were Iwo Jima, in the Bonin Islands, and Okinawa, in the Ryukyus. The Americans invaded the former in February 1945, the latter in April. Iwo Jima lay some 760 miles south of Tokyo, close enough to enable land-based fighter planes to escort squadrons of B-29s.

Both Iwo Jima and Okinawa are volcanic in origin, with rugged mountainous topography, and were desperately defended by fanatical Japanese troops for whom there would be no going home. Task Force 58, then at its peak in strength and experience, committed to prolonged aerial assaults on both islands and took the brunt of swarming kamikaze attacks. Those attacks proved more deadly and damaging than encounters with the carriers and battleships of the IJN, which by then was essentially toothless.

En route to Iwo Jima on February 16 and 17 Spruance was granted his long-standing wish to strike the Japanese home islands and launched more than 1,000 aircraft from TF 58 to attack enemy air bases, factories and other installations and engage any remaining combat aircraft. The attacks were a success, inflicting widespread damage, sinking several ships and downing some 500 Japanese planes at a cost of 88 U.S. fighters, 60 of those in combat.

At Iwo Jima TF 58 provided pre-landing bombardment support and aerial attacks through late February while continuing raids against the home islands. On February 21 kamikazes severely damaged Saratoga and sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea. The invasion cost the lives of nearly 7,000 Marines and more than 500 sailors with another 20,000 wounded. On the Japanese side the 21,000-man garrison was all but wiped out.

LEFT: NATIONAL DIET LIBRARY, JAPAN; RIGHT AND BELOW: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)

The summer of 1944 was characterized by a series of

Once in American hands Iwo Jima served as a valuable emergency haven for damaged B-29s and a base for fighter escorts assigned to bomber strikes on the home islands.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

LEFT: NATIONAL DIET LIBRARY, JAPAN; RIGHT AND BELOW: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)

Coming on the heels of Iwo Jima, the April 1 invasion

of Okinawa proved the bloodiest single battle of the Pacific.

As at Iwo Jima, Task Force 58 provided pre-landing bombardment support and aerial attacks against Okinawa while fending off repeated kamikaze attacks by more than 300 planes in just the first week of battle. A protracted series of kamikaze attacks stretched through May, costing the Japanese at least 1,500 aircraft (and pilots) and the Americans a dozen lost destroyers and hundreds of damaged ships.

Through war’s end kamikazes managed to cripple the fleet carriers Bunker Hill, Enterprise, Hancock, Intrepid and Wasp.

Among the desperate Japanese measures to hold Okinawa was a task force centered on the new outsize battleship Yamato, dispatched to disrupt the U.S. invasion. Mitscher launched nearly 400 carrier-based aircraft to intercept the formation. The massive Yamato finally capsized and sank after hits from at least 11 torpedoes and a half dozen bombs.

Altogether Allied naval forces lost more than 30 ships and more than 760 carrier-based aircraft in the Okinawa

Onlookers crowd every inch of space aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to witness the Sept. 2, 1945, Japanese surrender ceremony.

campaign. Nearly 5,000 U.S. sailors were killed, as were some 7,600 soldiers and Marines. Japan lost an estimated 110,000 soldiers and Okinawan conscripts by the time fighting there ended on June 21.

Task force raids on Japan then complemented the ongoing incendiary B-29 devastation wrought by U.S. Army Air Forces Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command. Throughout the summer of 1945, as Allied planners prepared for the invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall), air and sea attacks on the home islands mounted. The final curtain was about to fall on the Pacific War, which it did abruptly with the dropping of the two atomic bombs. Only on August 15, when Emperor Hirohito declared Japan’s unconditional surrender, did Nimitz halt all combat operations of the storied fast carrier task groups. MH Michael W. Robbins is a former editor of Military History and MHQ. For further reading he recommends War at Sea,

by Nathan Miller; The Fast Carriers, by Clark G. Reynolds; and Downfall, by Richard B. Frank.

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THE TRIO WHO UNIFIED JAPAN

Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu worked both together and at odds to forge a nation from a feudal war zone

By M.G. Haynes

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n 1615 Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu surveyed his last battlefield, the blood-soaked ground of Tennoji near Osaka. He’d seen much conflict across the width and breadth of the empire, but at age 72 his work was done. All of Japan had been brought under consolidated military rule—his rule, a fact made clear to all when the emperor named him shogun, meaning roughly “barbarian-quelling generalissimo.”

Yet Ieyasu hadn’t reached this peak by himself. The foundation for a unified Japan had been laid by his peers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. That Ieyasu not only knew but also fought both against and alongside his predecessors makes the story of Japan’s bloody unification unique in the annals of military history.

Nobunaga was a minor daimyo (feudal lord) when he embarked on his own path to greatness. Born within the precincts of Nagoya in 1534, he wrested leadership of the Oda clan when his father died in 1551. Through a series of campaigns concluding in 1559 he established control of Owari Province, the heavily fortified, rice-rich base of operations for all that followed.

The most powerful daimyo in all Japan, Nobunaga inevitably clashed with contemporary rivals Gauging the Oda clan weakened by the effort, the neighboring Imagawa clan struck, capturing castles at Washizu and Marune on the periphery of Nobunaga’s territory. With the visionary goal of seizing the imperial seat of power at Kyoto and declaring himself shogun, Imagawa Yoshimoto marched at the head of 25,000 men. While the Imagawa army rested in a distant gorge, Nobunaga force marched 3,000 Oda warriors into position and ambushed the far larger Editor’s note: Our style is to render pre–20th century Japanese names in the traditional order, surname followed by given name.

enemy force in a legendary victory that boosted his and his clan’s prestige. Samurai (Japan’s hereditary military nobility) flocked to his banner. Among them was an ambitious peasant named Kinoshita Tokichiro, who was destined for things far greater than his humble birth suggested. Generations of Japanese would come to know him as Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Nobunaga’s victory at the 1560 Battle of Okehazama sent the Imagawa into steep decline, weakening the clan’s hold over lesser daimyo and allowing them to be poached

by Nobunaga. Among the spoils were Matsudaira Motoyasu, his lands and his small but capable army. Motoyasu would become known to history as Tokugawa Ieyasu. Thus by 1561 all three warlords who would forge a unified Japan had surfaced in the historical record.

That same year, with the death of a key rival, Nobunaga moved on Mino Province, due north of his base in Owari.

Capping off that campaign in 1567, he seized Inabayama Castle, an imposing fortification more than 1,000 feet above the valley floor with clear lines of sight in all directions.

Renaming it Gifu Castle, Nobunaga made it his headquarters, while a network of lower castles barracked his growing army. As his power grew, Nobunaga adorned the fortified complex with increasingly luxurious palace grounds at the foot of the mountain. It remained his primary residence until the completion of Azuchi Castle in 1579.

With Mino secured and his forces ensconced around Gifu, Nobunaga marched on Omi Province, the gateway to Kyoto. His ostensible intentions were to install Ashikaga Yoshiaki as shogun to resolve a succession dispute within the latter’s failing shogunate. This was Nobunaga’s moment, and he clearly recognized it as such. His troops effortlessly rolled across Omi and entered Kyoto in 1568, bringing him instant fame for the rapidity and decisiveness with which he’d struck.

Securing the support of the new shogun—who, after all, owed his succession to the Oda clan—Nobunaga headed north into Echizen Province in 1570 to take on the allied Asakura and Azai clans. Though he faced an initial setback from a growing anti-Oda alliance, by 1573 he had crushed both the Asakura and Azai, seizing their respective Ichijodani and Odani castles and forcing their leaders to commit seppuku (ritual suicide).

Nobunaga then turned his wrath on the Ikko-ikki, a militant Buddhist sect that had joined the doomed opposition

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A mon is a Japanese heraldic emblem used to identify an individual, a clan or, in medieval times, a shogunate.

Left to right are the mon of the Oda, Toyotomi and Tokugawa.

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Oda Nobunaga

Oda Nobunaga (top) was a minor feudal lord until he seized Owari Province.

Left: A general of the Takeda clan watches the 1575 siege of Tokugawaaligned Nagashino Castle.

forces and fought him in the past. Pitting an army of religious zealots against Nobunaga’s seasoned samurai warriors, the resulting campaign featured prolonged sieges of Nagashima Castle and the fortified temple complexes of Mount Hiei and Ishiyama Hongan-ji, the main Ikko-ikki stronghold at Osaka. While the sect survived the onslaught, it lost all momentum and was eradicated as an effective armed force.

By 1573 the shogun, Yoshiaki, had tired of being a puppet and threw his support behind Nobunaga’s enemies. In response the mighty warlord deposed the thankless Yoshiaki.

Having made himself the most powerful daimyo in all Japan, Nobunaga inevitably clashed with contemporary rivals. He proved equal to the task. Conflict with the potent Takeda clan, for example, all but ended after the Takeda rashly besieged Tokugawa-aligned Nagashino Castle in 1575, prompting a forced march by Oda and Tokugawa warriors to relieve its defenders. In the resulting battle Nobunaga’s and Ieyasu’s allied forces decimated Takeda’s vaunted cavalry corps with what was arguably history’s first recorded use of volley fire by massed firearms.

With these victories Nobunaga, with clear designs on further conquest, secured control of central Honshu. He had refused several official titles offered by the deposed shogun, leaving no doubt who was really in charge. But treachery waited in the wings.

In 1582 one of Nobunaga’s subordinate generals, Akechi Mitsuhide, directed his army to surround Honno-ji Temple, where the daimyo was enjoying a tea ceremony with only his bodyguard and servants in attendance. The subsequent skirmish was fierce, but Nobunaga was trapped and committed seppuku rather than suffer the shame of capture.

To keep his head from falling into the traitor’s hands, he ordered his page to set the temple ablaze around them.

Thus ended the life of Japan’s most auspicious military leader to date. It remains unclear what motivated Mitsuhide to rebel against his liege. What is clear is that the general sought to turn the murder into a coup, sending out letters entreating the Mori clan to join him.

Hideyoshi, out east pressing the Mori on Nobunaga’s behalf, promptly terminated his campaign and returned to Kyoto like an avenging angel. Defeating Mitsuhide days later at the Battle of Yamazaki, Hideyoshi then stepped into the shoes of his late patron as leader of the consolidated forces.

Born in Nakamura to peasants in 1536, Hideyoshi blazed

the most remarkable path to success recorded in the Sengoku period. His father had served among the ashigaru— peasant foot soldiers who constituted the rank and file of the samurai armies. While many legends obscure Hideyoshi’s upbringing, he is thought to have been initially subordinate to the Imagawa before absconding with funds entrusted to him by that clan. By 1558, however, Hideyoshi was firmly in the employ of Nobunaga.

Nobunaga must have divined something special in the lowborn ashigaru, as he entrusted Hideyoshi with ever

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NATIONAL DIET LIBRARY (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

increasing responsibility, such as repairing fortifications and negotiating on his master’s behalf. The relatively easy 1561 seizure of Inabayama Castle is thought to have reflected Hideyoshi’s efforts, and by 1568 he was one of Nobunaga’s favorite generals. In 1573, following several successes, including a successful rearguard action that shielded his lord’s withdrawal from Echizen Province, Hideyoshi was made a daimyo in his own right, and the Oda clan granted him three districts in Omi. His steady ascension of the ranks put Hideyoshi in precisely the right place after Nobunaga’s 1582 assassination. Having avenged his benefactor’s death, he assumed command of the largest Japanese army ever assembled.

Perhaps more important, Hideyoshi shared Nobunaga’s vision for a unified Japan.

In a bold move Hideyoshi ordered the construction of a massive new fortress at Osaka. Built atop the very ashes of Hongan-ji Temple, in which Nobunaga had perished, the fortress represented an unambiguous statement of intent. Osaka Castle would remain the headquarters of the Toyotomi clan until its destruction in 1615. Having made all necessary logistical arrangements to see the

project through, Hideyoshi put his army in order and drafted plans for continued conquest—though he first had to tie up a few loose ends.

Not everyone was happy a former peasant had assumed control of Oda’s armies. Among the disgruntled were Nobunaga’s surviving second son, Nobukatsu, who convinced the powerful Ieyasu of the legitimacy of his hereditary claim. The succession crisis precipitated inconclusive battles at Komaki and Nagakute. While the remarkable military leaders never directly faced one another in combat, Hideyoshi worked behind the scenes to inhibit Ieyasu’s allies, ultimately forcing the latter’s Tokugawa clan to come to terms. Ieyasu remained Hideyoshi’s ally, albeit a reluctant one, for the rest of the latter’s extraordinary life.

Ineligible to receive the title shogun due to his lowly birth, Hideyoshi arranged to have himself named kampaku, imperial regent, providing him necessary legitimacy. Under the auspices of that political mantle Hideyoshi then devoted his attentions to achieving Nobunaga’s goal. In 1585 he seized Kii Province, crushing the warrior monks of Negoro-ji (onetime allies of the extinct Ikko-ikki), burning neighboring Ota Castle to the ground and slaughtering anyone who escaped the conflagration.

Using Kii as a base, Hideyoshi sent a 113,000-man invasion force to Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands, where he crushed the ruling Chosokabe clan following

NAGAHAMA CASTLE HISTORICAL MUSEUM

This Edo period folding screen depicts the 1575 siege of Nagashino by the Takeda clan. Allied forces under Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu lifted the siege, in part with volley fire from massed firearms.

NATIONAL DIET LIBRARY (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

NAGAHAMA CASTLE HISTORICAL MUSEUM

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

a 26-day siege of Ichinomiya Castle. Expanding in multiple directions at once, he simultaneously attacked Etchu Province to the north with 100,000 men.

Having completed these conquests by 1586, Hideyoshi dispatched his half-brother to invade Kyushu, Japan’s third largest island. Meanwhile, Hideyoshi himself, with some 200,000 men, conquered all of western Honshu in a drive to link up with his brother. By year’s end the siblings met in Satsuma Province, at the southern tip of Kyushu, where they forced 30,000 warriors of the Shimazu clan to surrender.

That left only one major opposition clan: the Hojo of Honshu’s Kanto Region, centered on the fortified village of Edo (present-day Tokyo). Repositioning his forces, Hideyoshi launched the inevitable assault on the Hojo in 1590. In the final showdown at Odawara Castle his 220,000 troops faced some 82,000 Hojo defenders. By then Hideyoshi’s power was undisputed, and the end was never in doubt.

After a three-month siege Hideyoshi compelled the Hojo to surrender by means of an ingenious ruse. While investing Odawara, he ordered the construction of a new fortress, Ishigakiyama Ichiya, beyond a distant tree line.

When its walls were complete—a feat accomplished in a mere 80 days—Hideyoshi had his men fell the intervening trees. Beholding what appeared to be an enemy fortress built overnight, the starving defenders lost their will

to fight and surrendered. With that, all of Japan was under Hideyoshi’s dominion.

Yet unification created a new set of problems. The empire had been at war with itself for 123 years. Conflict was all Japan’s warrior class had known, thus the sudden arrival of peace generated tension. Absent combat, how was an ambitious young samurai to achieve greatness? With inter-

Hideyoshi shared his benefactor Nobunaga’s vision for a unified Japan nal warfare outlawed, how could one increase the lands of family and clan? The samurai grew restless, nowhere more so than on Kyushu, where most warriors had surrendered rather than confront the massive invasion force. Just as threatening to Hideyoshi, who was a staunch Zen Buddhist, was the thoroughly foreign Christian religion practiced by large numbers of the Kyushu samurai.

The cunning kampaku soon devised a plan to rid himself of the most troublesome samurai while consolidating his rule back home. Hideyoshi fomented a foreign war, ostensibly affording an opportunity for the quarrelsome warriors

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to secure both lands and honor. In 1592, with the stated goal of conquering China and India, he launched back-to-back invasions of Joseon Korea.

Though the operations were poorly planned, Hideyoshi’s armies boasted significant tactical advantages over the Korean forces they encountered and thus pushed rapidly north, brushing aside all resistance. Ultimately, however, inadequate logistics, an ineffectual navy and intervention by the Ming Chinese undid the exertions of his soldiers. By the time Hideyoshi died in 1598, the Japanese had withdrawn to a string of fortifications along Korea’s southern coast, where they hunkered down, waiting for a chance to return home.

Hideyoshi’s death, while a boon to the troops enduring privation on the continent, bred problems of its own. The kampaku left behind a single male heir, 5-year-old Hideyori.

On realizing his life was ebbing, Hideyoshi had sought to ensure his toddler son’s rise to power by drawing chief allies and daimyos into a balanced regency of Hideyori.

Notwithstanding the regency or his oath to the dying kampaku, Ieyasu—the former vassal to Nobunaga and reluctant ally to Hideyoshi—wasn’t about to stand by and allow a child to rule Japan.

Ieyasu was born in 1542 at Okazaki Castle, southeast of Nagoya. In 1548, amid the violent interclan politics of the time, the Oda abducted 6-year-old Ieyasu and held him hostage. Nobunaga’s father, Nobuhide, threatened to kill Ieyasu if the Tokugawa refused to sever all ties with the Imagawa. Though Ieyasu’s father refused, Nobuhide didn’t

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M.G. HAYNES

Top left: This suit of armor once worn by Tokugawa Ieyasu is in the collection of the Tokugawa Art Museum, in Nagoya. Top right: This Edo period work depicts Ieyasu as a Shinto deity. Above: The shogun’s own matchlock was far more ornate than those carried by his troops.

TOP: TOKUGAWA ART MUSEUM, NAGOYA (2); BELOW: KAGAWA MUSEUM, TAKAMATSU-SHI

Tokugawa Ieyasu

M.G. HAYNES

TOP: TOKUGAWA ART MUSEUM, NAGOYA (2); BELOW: KAGAWA MUSEUM, TAKAMATSU-SHI

carry through with his threat. Had he done so, Japan’s history might have turned out very differently.

Ieyasu’s captivity, by first the Oda and then the Imagawa, lasted until he was 14, though as a potential future ally he was reportedly treated well. Once released to assume leadership of his clan, Ieyasu remained subordinate to the Imagawa and even led forces against the Oda for a time, by all accounts commanding well. The final defeat of the Imagawa in 1560 enabled him to assert a measure of independence, which he did by forming a lifelong alliance with Nobunaga.

Ieyasu was far more earnest in service to the Oda than to Hideyoshi, though why remains unclear. Perhaps he was disdainful of the latter’s humble origins, or maybe he foresaw he would have to contend with Hideyoshi for dominance.

Following Hideyoshi’s rise to power and the inconclusive power struggles that followed, Ieyasu negotiated an alliance with the former in 1585. Their combined victory at Odawara in 1590 left the whole of Hojo territory to be distributed as the kampaku saw fit. Wisely uncomfortable with having Ieyasu so close to his base at Osaka, Hideyoshi offered him the eight provinces of the Kanto Region in exchange for lands near Nagoya. Ieyasu agreed, taking ownership of the rich plains east of Mt. Fuji. That in turn provided Ieyasu with the physical distance he would need to formulate his own plans for domination.

In the wake of Hideyoshi’s 1598 death Ieyasu led an army west to Fushimi Castle, near Kyoto, within a day’s march of Osaka Castle, where the appointed heir, Hideyori, was being raised. This alarmed the other regents, who formed an alliance to oppose the potential usurper.

The aggressive moves prompted a nationwide split into a western faction, supporting young Hideyori’s regency, and an eastern faction, allied with the Tokugawa clan.

In 1600 Ieyasu marched his forces north in a pre-emptive strike on the Uesugi clan, steadfast allies of Hideyori. Before he could land the blow, however, he received word a western army was fast approaching and turned to meet the greater threat. In the subsequent Battle of Sekigahara his 89,000man eastern army met the 82,000-man western army in a fog-shrouded, confused engagement. Amid the fighting Ieyasu’s pre-eminence as a strategist became evident, and a sizeable portion of his opponent’s force defected, leading to a decisive defeat of the westerners. Over the next few days the victors hunted down and killed all surviving opposition leaders, leaving Ieyasu the master of all Japan.

Though Ieyasu was declared shogun in 1603, a final act remained in the saga of Tokugawa hegemony. In 1614 young Hideyori, still alive despite so much death on his behalf, rallied dispossessed ronin (masterless samurai) and his late father’s onetime supporters into a force with which he intended to recover his birthright. Refusing Ieyasu’s order to abandon Osaka Castle, Hideyori instead prepared for war.

Emerging from official retirement, Ieyasu led a 164,000man army against the 120,000 westerners holding out inside the vast bastion, surrounding the fortress in January 1615.

Razed after Ieyasu’s 1615 victory over Toyotomi Hideyori, Osaka Castle has been rebuilt many times and is one of Japan’s best-known landmarks.

The resulting siege of Osaka Castle is noteworthy for the presence of artillery on both sides—a rare sight on medieval Japanese battlefields. The shogunate fielded more than 300 pieces, including light Japanese cannons and larger, longrange European guns. Having failed to breach the outer walls by direct assault over the course of six weeks, Ieyasu resorted to a continuous, heavy bombardment and within three days negotiated a ceasefire. Yet Hideyori continued his saber-rattling.

Ambushes work.

The impasse stretched into summer when Ieyasu Choosing his ground returned and, in a signal victory south of Osaka at carefully, Nobunaga Tennoji, solidified his reign and that of his descen- surprised and defeated dants. It was Ieyasu’s final battle, and with it he a far larger Imagawa cemented the unified Japan we recognize today. force in 1560 with just

Tactical Takeaways

Contemporary Japanese acknowledge with

3,000 men—boosting his prestige and gaining samurai support.

Massed firepower... ...can trump superior manpower. In 1565 Nobunaga and Ieyasu cut down the Takeda cavalry with volley fire from massed firearms.

Artillery beats walls.

The advent of gunpowder weapons effectively eliminated the military value of fixed fortifications.

reverence the work of their three great unifiers. Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu took a continually warring mass of feudal domains and mercilessly hammered them into a nation. In present-day Japan, the only country in the world with a pacifist constitution, there is no pining for a return to those bellicose times, when wars never ceased, and samurai held the power of life and death over everyone. Yet there remains a very real sense Japan would not be the nation it is today had it not passed through such a fiery crucible. Thus its people maintain tremendous pride in the accomplishments of these three men, uttering their names with all the respect and admiration they earned by conquest at the edge of the sword. MH U.S. Army veteran M.G. Haynes holds a degree in Asian studies and is an author of military history and historical fiction. For further reading he recommends A History of Japan: 1334–1615, by George Sansom, and The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan, edited by John Whitney Hall.

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Master Sgt. Krystoffer Miller of the 325th Security Forces Squadron at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., takes a quad-legged unmanned ground vehicle (Q-UGV) on a 2021 exercise.

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ons ago humankind’s first warrior hurled a spear or stone and prayed to an appropriate deity to guide his ballistic weapon to its target. Millennia later modern-day man applied his genius and appetite for war toward improving his aim, using electric systems to guide weapons—and the vehicles that launched weapons—to often harder targets. Among the earliest guided weapons were torpedoes, such as that developed by John Louis Lay in 1872.

Towed behind a ship until launched, it worked, though not very well. Soon after development of the first practical airplane, the powers involved in World War I worked on guided aerial bombs, such as the gyroscopically controlled Kettering Bug, which took flight in 1918. World War II saw such weapons proliferate on land, sea and air. But it was the development of computers and the U.S.-owned and -operated Global Positioning System that ushered in a new era of warfare.

The perfection of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, in the 21st century has enabled chair-borne controllers to attack targets thousands of miles away. With such power, however, comes grave responsibility, and all too often a drone-launched missile kills innocent civilians, as happened during the August 2021 fall of Kabul, Afghanistan. A more sobering thought is that the latest generation of remote-control weapons are relatively inexpensive, widely available and fielded by more than 100 armed nations or organizations. The current crop might spark bloodless battles between machines or, perhaps more likely, remorseless remote slaughter. MH

WAR BY REMOTE

The Industrial Age ushered in the development of weapons that didn’t require their wielders to be anywhere near the field of combat

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Wired for War

D A Powered by compressed carbon dioxide, the innovative Lay torpedo was photographed (top left) at the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, R.I., in 1872 and illustrated in Scientific American a year later. B An American ground crew works on the Kettering aerial torpedo (aka the “Bug”) in 1918. C This view takes in

the open cockpit of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress modified into a guided bomb for Operation Aphrodite in 1944. Pilots took the aircraft aloft, then bailed out once an escorting plane took remote control . D German Waffen-SS troops prepare to send a Goliath tracked mine against Soviet positions on the Eastern Front in 1944. E At war’s end in 1945 Americans examine a captured Mistel—an unmanned Junkers Ju 88G guided bomb affixed beneath a piloted Focke-Wulf Fw 190A. F British soldiers of the 321 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, guide a Wheelbarrow robot to neutralize a suspected car bomb in Northern Ireland. Introduced in 1972, the robot saved countless lives amid the “Troubles.”

PREVIOUS SPREAD: AIRMAN 1ST CLASS ANNABEL DEL VALLE (U.S. AIR FORCE); A: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2); B: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE; C: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; D: BUNDESARCHIV; E: U.S. ARMY; F: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

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War Goes Largely Wireless

G Fortunate survivors view the effects of a buried improvised explosive device—possibly detonated by cell phone—on their Stryker armored fighting vehicle in Iraq in 2007. H Controllers in Kandahar (left) guide a

General Atomics MQ-1 Predator armed with two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles over southern Afghanistan in 2006.

Planners in Reno, Nev., provided mission specifics. I Operators aboard the guided missile cruiser USS Cape St. George launch a Tomahawk cruise missile from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at a target in Iraq in 2003.

J A Hezbollah terrorist in Lebanon sets up a Russian-made 9M14 Malyutka (NATO reporting name AT-3 Sagger) wire-guided antitank weapon to bombard Israel in 1996. K A Royal Marine flies a 4-by-1-inch Black Hornet 2 unmanned aerial vehicle. Developed in 2007 and used in Afghanistan from 2011, the camera-equipped UAV can silently hover for up to 25 minutes on a 1-mile line of sight. L A 132-foot Sea Hunter medium-displacement unmanned surface vessel awaits its next test cruise from Naval Base Point Loma, Calif., in 2021.

G: U.S. ARMY; H: VERONIQUE DE VIGUERIE (GETTY IMAGES), LT. COL. LESLIE PRATT (U.S. AIR FORCE); I: KENNETH MOLL/U.S. NAVY (GETTY IMAGES); J: MOHAMED ZATARI (ASSOCIATED PRESS); K: U.K. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE; L: MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS THOMAS GOOLEY (U.S. NAVY)

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G: U.S. ARMY; H: VERONIQUE DE VIGUERIE (GETTY IMAGES), LT. COL. LESLIE PRATT (U.S. AIR FORCE); I: KENNETH MOLL/U.S. NAVY (GETTY IMAGES); J: MOHAMED ZATARI (ASSOCIATED PRESS); K: U.K. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE; L: MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS THOMAS GOOLEY (U.S. NAVY)

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Will the latest crop of weapons spark bloodless robot wars or remorseless remote slaughter?

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THE OLIVE BRANCH AND THE SWORD

As Hernán Cortés made his way toward the Aztecan heart of Mexico, the conquistador ran up against a people who could make or destroy him

By Justin D. Lyons

Based on a 1585 drawing by Diego Muñoz Camargo, this 1892 image depicts Cortés and his Tlaxcalan allies engaging Aztec warriors.

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The chalcedony blade of this 16th century ceremonial knife is attached to a cedro wood handle depicting a crouching man dressed as an Aztec eagle warrior.

O

in April 1519, he had only vague notions of what lay ahead.

He knew the local people were subjects of a great empire governed by a mighty prince named Montezuma, who lived in a magnificent city in the interior. He also knew the Aztecs possessed wealth almost beyond the dreams of avarice, and he immediately began contemplating ways to make the most of the opportunities fortune had laid before him.

The force with which Cortés searched out his fame initially comprised 11 ships, 100 mariners, 508 soldiers—including 32 crossbowmen and 13 harquebusiers—16 horses, 10 heavy brass guns and four falconets—slender resources indeed with which to penetrate an empire whose territory held a population of many millions and whose influence stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Whatever other faults have been attributed to Cortés, Dating from 1540, this an inability to make simple numerical calculaengraved open helmet tions is not among them. It was crucial for him (a morríon in Spanish) to win allies, and he ultimately had tremenlikely belonged to a dous success in doing so. Tens of thousands senior officer. It is of the of natives would aid the Spaniards as warriors, one-piece style worn by the conquistadors, with porters and laborers and by supplying food a narrow, encompassing throughout the conquest of Mexico. Allies brim, upturned ends and not only assisted Cortés in material terms an end-to-end median crest for added strength. but also boosted his authority in his dealings with Montezuma. Of his allies, the most remarkable—both because of their character and the efforts necessary to secure their friendship—were the Tlaxcalans.

Cortés greatly desired to secure an alliance with the Tlaxcalans, reported to be an independent, hardy and warlike

Comb Morion

people, undying in their hatred for Montezuma and unyielding in resistance to his rule. Yet long years of encirclement by their foes and frequent raids and invasions of their lands by vassals of the empire had honed the mistrust of the Tlaxcalans to a fine edge. They had gotten advance word of these strange visitors who had come in great ships, of the fantastic beasts on which they rode, and of their thunder and smoke that killed. They also knew the men from the sea traveled to see Montezuma and marched in the company of his vassals. Thus they naturally assumed the foreigners were servants of their mortal foe, come to destroy them.

As Cortés neared the Tlaxcalan frontier, he sent ahead two Cempoalan chiefs as envoys. After waiting two days with no word, the column resumed its march and soon encountered the terrified envoys. Having arrived in the midst of war preparations, they had been seized as suspected spies. The Tlaxcalans, they said, positively burned with the fervor of determined resistance. None would listen to the Spanish overtures of goodwill. The only reply to Cortés’ offer of friendship was a resolve, often repeated in the captives’ presence, that whether the intruders were supernatural beings or mortal men, the Tlaxcalans would tear out their hearts and gnaw the flesh from their bones. Threatened with the same, the envoys had managed to slip away from their inattentive guards. Undaunted, Cortés unfurled his banner and marched forward.

The Spanish column had not traveled far when scouts reported some 30 Tlaxcalans ahead, equipped for battle and observing the column. Cortés ordered a detachment to capture one or more of them. But when the Spaniards beckoned with their hands and made signs of peace, the

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LEFT: MUSEO DEL PRADO, MADRID; RIGHT: LEEMAGE (GETTY IMAGES)

When Hernán Cortés landed on Mexico’s Gulf Coast

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n entering the state of Tlaxcala in what today is central Mexico, Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés soon found themselves surrounded by tens of thousands of hostile warriors and fighting desperately for survival. Of all the peoples they had encountered since their arrival in Mexico nearly five months ago, none had offered such fierce and determined resistance. The Tlaxcalans showed little fear of either Spanish horses or riders, even grasping the lances of the cavaliers and seeking to overthrow their mounts.

One horseman, unable to wrench his lance from the tenacious grasp of an enemy and robbed of his forward momentum, was immediately beset by a throng of warriors who struck at his charger with terrible obsidian-edged broadswords, nearly beheading the animal. Struggling out from beneath his lifeless horse, the rider shielded himself from his assailants’ blows with upraised arm and rodela (a small steel shield, or buckler). He surely would have died on the spot had his fellows not rushed to the rescue. A sharp battle raged, as fierce as any waged over a Homeric hero, before the Spaniards withdrew with the rider and his saddle. The Tlaxcalans, after hacking further at the remains of the horse, carried off severed chunks for display to fellow countrymen, to prove the vulnerability of the beasts. The rider later succumbed to his wounds.

Montezuma

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Hernán Cortés

warriors mounted a furious attack. As the vanguard met their charge, killing five of the enemy, a force of some 3,000 screaming Tlaxcalans sprang from ambush, unleashing a hail of arrows and fire-hardened darts.

Cortés immediately ordered the rest of the column forward. Soldiers brought their harquebuses and crossbows to bear, and once rolled into position, the artillery barked out death on the massed attackers. The Tlaxcalans were well accustomed to the sounds of battle as they knew it— drums, horns, the thud of weapons striking flesh, the cries of men—but they entered a new realm of sensation as the report of firearms thundered in their ears, and terrible echoes rolled back from the surrounding hills. Death descended on thunderous wings. Yet while the warriors gradually gave way under this novel destruction, they did not flee. They retreated in an orderly fashion, maintaining their ranks. Encamping by a stream, the Spaniards spent an uneasy night sleeping in their armor with weapons ready.

The horses remained saddled and bridled, and sentries and patrols kept vigilant watch.

The next morning they resumed the march, only to find their path blocked by an army of 6,000 warriors who made their deadly intentions clear through hostile demonstrations. Cortés once again tried diplomacy, sending forth

three captives of the previous day’s fight bearing a message of peace. The message was ill-received. No sooner had the captives blended into the ranks of their fellows than the entire multitude began to howl with rage, their weapons and colorful plumage swaying like a forest whipped by storm winds. Battle was joined.

A force of some 3,000 screaming Tlaxcalans sprang from ambush, unleashing a hail of arrows The Tlaxcalan fighters were no unruly mob, but an organized army with strict military discipline. Many were slain in the initial assault, and the survivors fell back. But their purpose was not swift victory; rather, by a gradual and controlled retreat they sought to lure their enemy forward into difficult terrain where many thousands of their fellows waited in ambush. When those warriors did spring the trap, the Spanish were in a fix, unable to adequately defend themselves on broken ground where their cavalry was of little use. Fighting their way through a shower of

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missiles past several ravines, they drew up on level ground and dressed their lines. Cortés realized that cohesion of their formation was the key to survival. As they were surrounded, any advance of the infantry would necessarily open gaps through which warriors might pour. The only mobile arm of the Spanish force was the cavalry, led by Cortés himself, which for the better part of an hour wheeled and charged endlessly within the shrinking sphere of open ground. Only after eight of their captains fell slain did the Tlaxcalans finally withdraw, concluding

what the Spaniards would call the Battle of Tehuacingo, fought on Sept. 2, 1519.

The dawn of September 3 brought no fresh assault,

so the Spaniards spent the day resting, repairing equipment and replenishing their stock of crossbow bolts. Cortés used the time for reflection. The courage and tenacity displayed by the Tlaxcalans in battle made them even more desirable as allies, yet they had met every attempt at amicable communication with threats or immediate attack.

How, Cortés wondered, could he overcome the mistrust and hatred the Spaniards’ presence seemed to engender and establish diplomatic discourse?

Among the 15 captives taken on the second day of battle were two chiefs, and Cortés had them brought before him for questioning. To their surprise they had been well-treated

MUSEO DEL PRADO, MADRID (3)

In the 17th century colonial Mexican brothers Juan and Miguel González rendered 24 panels illustrating significant moments in the conquest of Mexico. These three depict (left to right) Cortés’ sinking of his own ships to keep soldiers from abandoning the campaign, Montezuma and entourage en route to greeting Cortés and Montezuma presenting Cortés with gifts.

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MUSEO DEL PRADO, MADRID (3)

Tactical Takeaways

and were thus willing to talk. From them Cortés learned much about the land and people of Tlaxcala. Each locality had its own lord, maintained and supported through a system of feudal dependency not unlike the structure that had long prevailed in Europe. Assembled in council, such lords represented the government of Tlaxcala, and each contributed forces for their mutual defense.

The chiefs informed Cortés their supreme commander was Xicotencatl, a most fierce and resolute man. It was he who adamantly maintained the Spaniards were spies of Montezuma and insisted on their annihilation. His was the banner spotted waving over the warriors who had fought with such ferocity, and his colors adorned their faces. Cortés emerged from council with the chiefs strengthened in his conviction the Spaniards must press on—continuing to extend diplomatic overtures, yes, but destroying all who rose

against them. The next morning he led out a force to seek provisions in nearby towns and take prisoners, lest his foe infer from inaction the Spaniards had been weakened or discour- Exploit divisions. aged by the resistance they had encountered. Cortés realized the Cortés returned to camp that afternoon Tlaxcalans’ hatred with some 20 additional captives, who doubt- of the Aztecs would make them useful less anticipated a horrible fate. Instead, they allies, both by sharing were fed, presented with beads and entreated their local knowledge by interpreters to lay down their anger and be- and by bolstering the come brothers with the Spaniards. Cortés then small Spanish force. set them free. He also released the two chiefs, Don’t bring a knife... ...to a gunfight. The directing them to bear another message of Aztecs were mighty peace to the capital. Intercepted by sentries and warriors, but their taken before Xicotencatl, the pair returned to weapons of stone and Cortés with a message that peace would come wood were no match for only when the gods had been appeased with an the Spaniards’ firearms. offering of Spanish hearts and blood. Adding All glory is fleeting.

Though Montezuma to this bleak pronouncement, the chiefs re- came from a long line ported that the combined forces of Tlaxcala of emperors, his loss had gathered to destroy them. Spanish padres to Cortés doomed both him and his empire. kept busy all night hearing confessions.

The sun rose on men prepared for death.

Thinking it better for morale to keep the men active than to wait in uncertainty, Cortés assembled the army. His remarks were practical rather than inspirational. All were to remain calm and methodical. Artillerymen were to direct their fire into dense groups of the enemy. Some crossbowmen and harquebusiers were to load while others fired, thus maintaining as continuous a stream of fire as possible without wasting ammunition. Swordsmen were to employ their points, thrusting into the bowels of their adversaries. Horsemen were to charge at half speed, restrain their mounts and aim their lances at the face and eyes of the enemy. None were to break ranks. To fail to maintain cohesive lines or succumb to exhaustion was to die. With those words of grim advice ringing in their ears, the men marched forth. Even the wounded, with the aid of their comrades, donned armor, grabbed weapons and kept pace as best they could, for all knew no man could be spared from this crucial contest.

They had not gone far when the Spaniards beheld the largest army they had yet seen in the New World. Sun glinting from spear points of copper and obsidian formed undulating waves of light above the throng of warriors. All shouted defiance and raised a fearsome war cry to accompany the thunder of drums. From what he had learned of native heraldry, Cortés could identify the banners of principal captains, as well as Xicotencatl’s personal armorial device—a white heron atop a rock. Beside it flew a banner emblazoned with a golden eagle on outstretched wings— the standard of the Tlaxcalan state. Spanish chroniclers estimated enemy numbers at anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 men. Even at the low estimate, the position of the 400-odd Spaniards and their handful of Indian allies would have been akin to a sandcastle trying to hold back the sea.

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too high. The ground was littered with their dead and wounded, maimed and torn in ways they had neither experienced nor imagined. Their energy was spent, and the tide receded. The battle had lasted some four hours.

The Spaniards, nearly all wounded in one way or another, were utterly exhausted. As they staggered back to camp, the soldiers raised prayers of gratitude to God for their survival.

MAY–AUGUST 1521

Cortés’ Trek to Tenochtitlán

GULF OF MEXICO

CORTÉS ARRIVES

APRIL 1519

PRESENT-DAY MEXICO CITY

TLAXCALA MILES 0

20

Montezuma warmly welcomed Cortés on the latter’s Nov. 8, 1519, arrival in Tenochtitlán. A week later the Spaniards took the Aztec emperor hostage.

No embassies were exchanged. When the Spaniards came into range, warriors released a spattering of missiles, which quickly became a torrent. Cortés and his men suffered their stings until reaching a distance more favorable for their guns and artillery. The volleys they fired into the densely packed enemy ranks inflicted dreadful carnage.

The Tlaxcalans could not carry the dead and wounded from the field as quickly as they were struck down.

No longer able to endure this punishment, Xicotencatl’s warriors surged forward like a crashing tide. Spears and clubs hammered against the rodelas of the swordsmen as the latter strove to maintain the line. Their arms burned with fatigue as they repeatedly thrust into the bodies of a seemingly unending stream of attackers. Though crossbowmen and harquebusiers desperately poured fire into the enemy horde, the weight of numbers began to tell, and breaches opened in the Spanish line. Cortés bellowed orders but could not make himself heard above the din. For a moment it looked as though the Spaniards and their allies would be swept away.

Yet even as their victory seemed at hand, the Tlaxcalans were no longer able to sustain the attack. The price had been

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WADSWORTH ATHENEUM, HARTFORD (AKG-IMAGES)

BATTLE OF TENOCHTITLÁN

again sent envoys to the Tlaxcalan capital, seeking peace and safe passage. Angered rather than chastened by their army’s defeat, the lords rejected the overture and ordered Xicotencatl to mount a nighttime assault. Though he attacked with 10,000 of his best warriors, the Tlaxcalan commander fared no better, as the Spaniards were constantly on the alert.

On the heels of this latest failure the next day’s embassy received a more favorable reception. Among the elder lords, held in great respect, was the namesake father of Xicotencatl. He advised making peace with the Spaniards. Like Cortés, he thought the valiant soldiers from across the sea would make invaluable allies. Cempoalan envoys who had accompanied the Spaniards from the coast reported to the lords that Cortés had ordered Totonac settlements in the high sierra to cease paying tribute to Montezuma. The news allayed Tlaxcalan fears these visitors were servants of their great enemy and gave weight to Spanish declarations of goodwill. Heeding the elder Xicotencatl’s counsel, the lords ordered their army to cease attacking the Spaniards.

But the younger Xicotencatl, his blood up, was loath to lay down his arms and reaffirmed his intention to annihilate the Spaniards. Negotiations ground to a halt as the four chiefs chosen as ambassadors would not proceed for fear of the obstinate commander. The lords then got word to the army’s captains not to obey Xicotencatl unless he made peace with Cortés.

At last the commander agreed to send an embassy of 40 gift-bearing Tlaxcalans to the Spanish camp. His emissaries remained there overnight, making detailed observations. The alert Cempoalans suspected these men to be spies and warned Cortés that Xicotencatl had encamped nearby with the likely intention of mounting another nighttime assault. Convinced of the same after interrogating two of the emissaries, Cortés sent an uncompromising message. Taking 17 spies captive, he cut off the hands of some, the thumbs of others, and had these grisly trophies sent to their commander. The message the returning emissaries bore was unequivocal: Xicotencatl was to present himself in two days to accept the Spanish offer of peace, or Cortés would seek him out and destroy him.

The results of his gambit were immediate. The four ambassadors, no longer blocked by the army, approached camp that very day. Appearing before Cortés, they made deep obeisance and begged his pardon for having attacked him. The Tlaxcalans, they explained, had believed the Spaniards to be agents of Montezuma, who had never ceased

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

On the heels of his almost miraculous victory Cortés

in his attempts by force or fraud to invade their country.

The ambassadors asked forgiveness for their error and accepted Cortés’ offer of friendship.

WADSWORTH ATHENEUM, HARTFORD (AKG-IMAGES)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Spaniards entered the capital of Tlaxcala on Sept. 23,

1519. Taking the lords aside, Cortés questioned them closely concerning interior Mexico and the Aztec empire.

He heard again of the great power and wealth of Montezuma and was given a detailed description of the Aztecan capital of Tenochtitlán—the causeways by which it was approached, its fortifications, its infrastructure and its public buildings. The Tlaxcalan elders even brought pictures painted on henequen cloth depicting their battles with the Aztecs, from which Cortés learned much concerning Montezuma’s command structure and tactics.

The Spanish alliance with Tlaxcala continued to yield much of value throughout the conquest of Mexico. The Tlax-

In Emmanuel Leutze’s 1848 painting Cortés (center, in black) and his conquistadors battle Aztec warriors atop Tenochtitlán’s main temple.

calans provided supplies, fought alongside the conquistadors against the hostile vassals of Montezuma, gave the Spaniards safe haven after their initial expulsion from the Valley of Mexico, contributed warriors to the siege of Tenochtitlán and participated wholeheartedly in the final destruction of the hostile and oppressive Aztec empire. Cortés’ olive branch had fostered that successful military alliance. MH Justin D. Lyons is an associate professor of history and government at Ohio’s Cedarville University. For further reading he recommends A True History of the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo; Conquest: Cortés, Montezuma and the Fall of Old Mexico, by Hugh Thomas; and History of the Conquest of Mexico, by William H. Prescott.

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THE COMBAT OF THE THIRTY In 1351 opposing hosts of medieval knights and squires met on a Breton field of honor—not to settle a war, but to test one another’s mettle

By Michael G. Stroud

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Commissioned by Napoléon III for the museum at Versailles, Octave Penguilly L’Haridon’s 1857 oil The Combat of the Thirty accurately depicts the combatants’ weapons, clothing and heraldry.

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Some participants in the Combat of the Thirty carried maces—steel clubs with pointed flanges that could defeat both mail and plate armor.

O Bretagne

John’s strongholds. Though Montfort had secured Edward’s promise of military aid, it arrived too late. After back-toback defeats at Champtoceaux on October 26 and Nantes on November 2, John was captured and imprisoned in Paris.

The period following Montfort’s imprisonment has been dubbed the War of the Two Jeannes, as it pitted Bloisists loyal to Jeanne de Penthièvre against Montfortists led in John’s absence by Jeanne de Flandre, his French wife. In the wake of John’s capture the Montfortists lost support and fared poorly, by fall 1342 forfeiting all but the garrisoned port of Brest. The subsequent arrival of promised English forces would expand the internal War of the Breton Succession into a proxy war between England and France.

It proved troublesome for both.

In early August 1342 William de Bohun, Earl of North-

ampton, sailed from Portsmouth with some 1,350 English soldiers in 260 coastal transports, followed days later by 800 men under disaffected Breton noble Robert of Artois.

Panicked by the English fleet’s arrival off Brest, Charles broke his siege and fled.

Securing Breton reinforcements that expanded his force to some 2,500 men, Northhampton moved inland to besiege the Bloisist fortress of Morlaix. Though the size of either army remains in debate, Charles and a far larger French army moved to break the siege. The outcome of the September 30 clash proved inconclusive, the English pulling back into the woods, secure from enemy cavalry, and the French largely withdrawing after having suffered steep losses, including 50 knights killed.

A flurry of diplomatic and military activity followed.

In January 1343 Pope Clement VI played mediator, securing the Truce of Malestroit in hopes France and England could work out their differences before the pact’s Septem-

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The War of the Breton Succession erupted in 1341 after John III, Duke of Brittany, died that April 30 without an heir, but after having named rival successors to his ducal title. One was his niece, Jeanne de Penthièvre, wife of Charles of Blois, the latter a nephew of French King Philip VI. The other was his formerly estranged younger half brother, John de Montfort. With a mercenary army to back him, Montfort gained the support, or at least submission, of the principal Breton towns, as well as control of the ducal treasury. While an assembly of townspeople and minor nobles recognized him as duke that May, he enjoyed only marginal acceptance among the upper nobility.

Courting the military might of the French crown in their effort to wrest Brittany from Montfort, Charles and Jeanne appealed to Uncle Philip for assistance. At the same time Montfort negotiated with English King EdAdopted in 1316 by ward III for support. France and England had John III, Duke of Britrecently signed a truce in the broader Huntany, and referred to dred Years’ War (1337–1453), which centered as the plain ermine, the on competing claims over the Duchy of Aquicoat of arms of Brittany taine and the French throne itself after the (blason de Bretagne in French) is a stylized 1328 death of Charles IV without a male heir. representation of the fur The succession crisis in Brittany provided of the ermine, a shortEdward an excuse to resume hostilities and tailed weasel that figures in Breton lore and culture. open another front against Philip, further sapping French resources and possibly providing the English a foothold in western France.

Word of Montfort’s negotiations with the English reached Philip, who formally recognized Charles and Jeanne’s ducal claim and furnished them with troops. In early October the king’s nephew led an army of 5,000 French soldiers, 2,000 Genoese mercenaries and a contingent of Bretons against

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n March 26, 1351, in the Duchy of Brittany in western France, two teams of knights, squires and men-at-arms faced off across a field midway between Josselin and Ploërmel castles. Though it was springtime and far from the dog days of summer, sweat streamed down the faces of those assembled.

From either side men clad in 30 pounds of armor took the measure of their opposition in anticipation of the coming engagement.

Jean de Beaumanoir, the French governor of Josselin Castle and champion of the House of Blois claim to Brittany, strode out to midfield to formally challenge his rival, Sir Robert Bemborough, the English captain of Ploërmel castle and champion of the House of Montfort claim to the duchy. Each had mustered 30 men on this predetermined day to give battle in what would become known as the Combat of the Thirty. Its outcome would not settle the ongoing War of the Breton Succession but was a question of chivalric honor.

ber 1346 expiration. It proved a vain hope, due largely to nonstop partisan fighting between Bloisist and Montfortist factions. Philip’s execution of prominent Montfortist captives in 1344 didn’t help matters. But not even the death of an ailing Montfort in 1345 or the capture of Blois at the Battle of La Roche-Derrien on June 20, 1347, could stop the bloody grind. Though Charles would spend the better part of a decade in English custody, his followers continued the struggle in his stead, as did those of the late Montfort.

Thus it was in the spring of 1351, after years of retaliatory raids against one another—and perhaps out of sheer boredom at the monotonous nature of the conflict—Jean de Beaumanoir issued his challenge to Sir Robert Bemborough, as imagined in “The Combat of the Thirty,” English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1859 translation of a 14th century Breton ballad:

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’Twere best, methinks, adjust our difference in this way By mortal combat in the field on some appointed day.

Thirty ’gainst Thirty, an you list, together we will fight, Armed at all points, and on our steeds—and Heaven defend the right!

Bemborough eagerly accepted the challenge. The rivals settled on a field of contest between Josselin and Ploërmel (roughly 7 miles apart) marked by a solitary tree known as the Chêne de Mi-Voie (Midway Oak). Combatants would adhere to chivalric ideals. All involved were to conduct themselves without deceit or trickery, there would be no reinforcements, and the fight would continue until there emerged a clear victor.

The concept of pre-arranged combat was neither unique to medieval Europe nor unprecedented. Stemming from ancient duels between the champions of opposing armies (think David and Goliath of biblical fame or Achilles and Hector of Trojan War legend), structured combat allowed warring rivals to put their martial mettle on display, either as a prelude or an alternative to full-scale battle. The Combat of the Thirty would epitomize this on a scale larger than that of any known prior contest.

Having agreed on the particulars, Beaumanoir and Bemborough returned to their respective citadels to select men for the tournament. The former’s squad was wholly Breton, comprising 10 knights and 20 squires, while Bemborough chose seven knights and 20 squires and men-at-arms of diverse backgrounds, including 20 Englishmen, six Germans and four Bretons. The combatants armed themselves with a range of fearsome weapons, including falchions (single-edged, singled-handed sabers), lances, battle-axes, mauls and daggers. According to Ainsworth’s translation of the Breton ballad, brawny English knight Sir Thomas Bélifort brought to the fight a “rude mawle [sic]” weighing 25 pounds.

Word of the forthcoming contest spread throughout neighboring towns and villages, drawing spectators from across the region and lending a festival-like atmosphere

Top: During the Hundred Years’ War period the Estates-General comprised French clergy, nobility and commoners who advised the king, but lacked any real power. Above: Jean de Beaumanoir and the Bretons of Josselin castle pray before engaging Sir Robert Bemborough’s knights of Ploërmel.

to the death match by the oak tree. The Bretons under Beaumanoir were the local favorite to win.

Several period narratives relate the conduct of the contest. Presenting a clean-cut account of chivalric behavior is Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. Froissart (c. 1337–1405) was a French-speaking heroic poet and court historian who interviewed countless witnesses to the signal events of his era, 59

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FRANCE P R E S E N T- DAY BORDERS

making him the preeminent chronicler of the first half of the Hundred Years’ War. “And when they all had come face to face,” he wrote of the outset of the Combat of the Thirty, “they spoke a little, all 60 of them, and then stepped back a pace, each party to its own side.”

Froissart’s account was clearly intended to capture the very best knightly virtue had to offer, whether French or English in origin, and to persuade readers such ideals were

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JEAN-POL GRANDMONT, CC BY-SA 4.0

COMBAT OF THE THIRTY

worthy of regard and emulation. In an era of near-constant warfare and rampant pillaging, life was cheap, thus it is plausible he also sought to extend a measure of hope in the codification and conduct of knighthood.

A more Francocentric take on the encounter appears in the poem “The Battle of the Thirty English and the Thirty Bretons,” credited to an unknown Breton. Unlike the idealistic exchange in Froissart’s Chronicles, the language here is more personal and verbally combative. “Where art though, Beaumanoir?” chides the proud Bemborough. “I have thee at default; hadst thou been here, full speedily discomfited thou’dst been.” Answering his rival, the humble Beaumanoir rises above the petty insults. “We hear you well, me and my company. If it please the King of Glory and St. Mary and the good St. Yves, in whom I have great faith, throw the dice,

BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

BRITTANY

Though less accurate than L’Haridon’s 1857 depiction, the work above (drawn from a 1480 history of the Bretons) does illustrate both Josselin and Ploërmel castles.

don’t hold back. The luck will fall on you, your life will be short.” Such banter seems more realistic of seasoned warriors who have killed for king and country. Though their true discourse is impossible to know, it likely fell somewhere between the two retellings.

Their medieval trash talking done, the combatants returned to their respective sides to await the signal to engage. Beaumanoir and Bemborough had agreed to the appointment of what amounted to referees. These appointees would commence the contest, call out breaks for food, wine or medical care and generally ensure the integrity of the engagement.

With the opponents primed, weapons in hand, the signal was given, and the rival hosts raced toward one another and collided. “Like bolts into the fray they rush[ed],” wrote Froissart, “the shock…fierce and dread.”

The field was soon obscured in a flurry of blood and sweat as participants stabbed and swung swords, daggers, lances, hammers and mauls in efforts to cripple or kill their opponents. Early in the engagement a Frenchman was killed, but his compatriots held to their chivalric code and stood their ground. The engagement continued unabated for several hours until thirst and exhaustion forced a break from the fighting. By that point the Bretons had suffered four dead, the English two. The anonymous Breton poet recounted their hospitable “halftime”:

JEAN-POL GRANDMONT, CC BY-SA 4.0

BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Wearied at length with such great toil, they on a truce agreed, And for a while repose they took, whereof all stood in need.

With good wine of Anjou full soon their thirst they did allay, And thus refreshed the deadly strife they recommenced straightway.

Having drained their wineskins, bound their wounds and caught their breath, the bruised and bloodied knights resumed their savage contest to the delight of spectators. As the tempo of battle picked up, the situation looked grim for the Bretons, who lost two more killed and three captured, leaving scarcely two dozen on the field. Sensing victory at hand, Bemborough heaped insults on Beaumanoir, but his taunts had an unintended effect. Rising to his lord’s defense, Breton squire Alain de Keranrais lanced the haughty Bemborough right between the eyes, killing him on the spot.

But as the French had earlier in the contest, the English closed ranks, showing no sign of retreat. It was at that decisive moment Breton squire Guillaume de Montauban leapt on his charger and rode straight into the English ranks. Attacking “with lightning speed,” he knocked down and trampled scores of enemy knights, squires and men-at-arms.

Though his mounted charge may have represented a breach of etiquette, the outcome proved such a crushing blow that the English could not carry on and effectively capitulated.

A French national monument on the River Oust in Brittany, Josselin Castle has been modified several times since 1351.

With that the bloody tournament on the field of contest

between Josselin and Ploërmel drew to a close. Beaumanoir emerged victorious at the cost of at least six dead, although there is confusion as to the exact number, while the English lost nine killed, including Bemborough. The surviving Englishmen did not flee but surrendered to the victors, and those who could still walk were marched into captivity at Josselin Castle.

The tournament had no effect on the War of the Breton Succession, nor was that the intention KINGDOM of its participants. For them it was a matter of OF FRANCE honor, pure and simple. The war dragged on until Sept. 29, 1364, when Charles of Blois was KNIGHTS killed at Auray in battle against a victorious AND SQUIRES John IV, son of John of Montfort. The subsequent Treaty of Guérande recognized the Montfort claim on the Duchy of Brittany, thus ending DEAD the long and grueling war.

KINGDOM The full motivations behind the Combat of OF ENGLAND the Thirty will likely never be known. Was it solely an exercise in chivalry? Or was the intent more mundane, perhaps to rally local Bretons KNIGHTS around the French faction while demonizing the AND SQUIRES English? Whatever the reasoning, the idealized engagement between chivalric factions showcased men largely conducting themselves with honor DEAD and courtesy—even in the face of death. MH

Combat of the Thirty

30 6

30 9

Michael G. Stroud is a Michigan-based military historian who contributes to both print and online publications.

For further reading he recommends “Combat of the Thirty According to the Amiens ms. Version of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles,” translated by Steven Muhlberger; Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years’ War, by John A. Wagner; and The Hundred Years’ War, Part II: Different Vistas, edited

by L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay.

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‘DIE OR CO Amid the early 19th century South American wars of independence a legion of hardened British veterans answered Simón Bolívar’s call for volunteers

By Jerome A. Long

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CONQUER’ Many of the British soldiers who fought under Wellington at Waterloo in 1815 (above) soon found themselves fighting for another leader on a far continent.

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Held in a private collection until 1948, the ornate hat of Bolívar compatriot Gen. Francisco de Paula Santander resides in the National Museum of Colombia.

S

Spanish rule, Bolívar nevertheless realized his revolutionary army lacked experienced, professional soldiers. Thus in 1817 he made a concerted effort through agents in London to recruit those officers and noncommissioned officers who had found themselves suddenly unemployed in the wake of Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1815 final defeat in the Netherlands at Waterloo. The European nations that had aligned against the “Little Corporal” were awash with vast numbers of trained soldiers and no war to fight. By one estimate Great Britain alone had a half million unemployed fighting men.

The Second British Legion’s motto was ‘Die or Conquer,’ recognizing their certain fate should they fail Among them Bolívar found the veterans he needed.

Ignoring the protests of its late Napoléonic wars ally Spain, the British government tacitly approved Bolívar’s recruitment of its idle soldiers. There is speculation the Duke of Wellington himself encouraged the scheme.

Bolívar’s recruitment efforts were extraordinarily successful, and the British regiments filled out rapidly. Among them were the 1st and 2nd Venezuelan Hussars and the 1st Venezuelan Lancers, although some European officers—

including William Miller, Thomas Cochrane and the notorious Gregor MacGregor—served apart from the legions with high distinction as staff and field officers. Competition for commissions was fierce, given that many captains and lieutenants in the British army were then serving at half pay, while many veteran NCOs had been summarily discharged.

Although the volunteer units were collectively known as the British Legions, some 1,700 Irishmen recruited by adventurer John Devereux formed what was dubbed the Irish Legion. In 1818 British Legion commander James Towers English recruited a 1,000-man Second British Legion that included 110 Hanoverians who had seen action at Waterloo with the King’s German Legion of the British army. Bolívar reorganized and reconstituted his army several times during the wars of independence.

The Second British Legion’s motto was “Die or Conquer,” recognizing their certain fate should they fail. In his twovolume 1828 biography of William Miller, the general’s brother John described the possible consequences: The patriot soldier might indeed expect to escape with life, reduced to the condition of a slave; but with the patriot generals and officers it was only a choice between victory and death. They knew full well what would be the cruel policy of the Spaniards if they proved victorious.

The battle in which Rooke was mortally wounded

took place on July 25, 1819, near Paipa, in the Spanish

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MUSEO NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA; JAMES WAGSTAFF, ALBUM (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 2); MINISTERIO DE RELACIONES EXTERIORES, VENEZUELA; UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO; CENTER: NATIONAL MUSEUMS SCOTLAND

Resolved to freeing northern South America from

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHRISTIE’S (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); THIS PAGE: MUSEO NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA

imón Bolívar, the vaunted “Libertador” of South America, was in serious trouble. Outflanked on the left by Spanish royalists at Vargas Swamp in New Granada (present-day Colombia), his troops had withdrawn in disorder, threatening Bolívar’s patriot army with collapse. The situation called for immediate action. Without hesitation James Rooke led his battalion of 2nd Rifles in a desperate bayonet charge to drive the menacing enemy from the heights. Fighting the royalists uphill toe to toe, the patriots suffered horrendous losses before additional reserves turned the tide. By the time the firing stopped, Rooke and his second-in-command, Arthur Sandes, were seriously wounded. Losing his shattered left arm to amputation, Rooke died a few days later.

Rooke was no ordinary commander, and his 2nd Rifles no ordinary battalion. They were an element of the British Legions, recruited by Bolívar amid the 1808–33 South American wars of independence to provide the combat experience many of his native troops lacked. The battalion was a hodgepodge of primarily British and Irish veterans of the Napoléonic and North American wars. In time they were joined by Germans and even a scattering of Bengalis, West Indians and Americans. The volunteers ranged from adventurers and mercenaries, to criminals, deserters and scallywags. Many simply absconded with Bolívar’s money. Those who did show up to fight, however, played a key role in the various fights for independence. Some remained in South America to become leaders and heroes in the new republics.

Simón Bolívar

James Rooke

Francisco de Paula Santander

Gregor MacGregor

William Miller

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MUSEO NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA; JAMES WAGSTAFF, ALBUM (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 2); MINISTERIO DE RELACIONES EXTERIORES, VENEZUELA; UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO; CENTER: NATIONAL MUSEUMS SCOTLAND

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHRISTIE’S (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); THIS PAGE: MUSEO NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA

Arthur Sandes

Viceroyalty of New Granada, 100 miles northeast of the capital at Santa Fé de Bogotá. In June Bolívar led a joint expedition of Venezuelans and New Granadans west to liberate Bogotá from the Spanish. An army of 1,700 royalists under Col. José Maria Barreiro set out to intercept them.

Having endured a forced march across the Andes in damp, icy conditions, Bolívar’s troops arrived in New Granada exhausted. His cavalry had no horses, a lack of pack mules had forced the column to abandon supplies, and the moisture had corroded muskets and saturated cartridges. After collecting supplies, arms, ammunition, horses, mules and recruits from among the local populace, Bolívar resumed his march with some 2,700 men.

Bolívar initially found Spanish dug in near Topagá. While a patriot holding force confronted the royalists, the general maneuvered to attack from the rear only to find himself hemmed in by the nearly impassible terrain of the Vargas Swamp. Learning of Bolívar’s maneuver, Barreiro pivoted to attack. Bolívar held his cavalry and the British Legion in reserve while his main effort contested the Spanish attack

inch by inch. Barreiro responded by committing his reserves each time the patriots appeared to withdraw. Anticipating a rout, he ultimately committed all his reserves.

Despite holding a numerical advantage over the Spanish, Bolívar suddenly found his left outflanked and his troops withdrawing in panic. It was then he committed his reserves, including Rooke’s 2nd Rifles. As one writer observed, “The bayonet in the hands of an angry British soldier is a fearful weapon,” and Rooke’s ferocious charge indeed saved the day, but at a high cost to the British Legion.

The narrow victory was a preview of the decisive Battle of Boyacá scarcely two weeks later. Marching his troops southwest from Vargas Swamp, Bolívar raced to attack lightly defended Bogotá. If the royalists won the race, Bolívar’s campaign would grind to a halt, and any strategic advantage would pass to the Spanish. If Bolívar won, the patriot army would be in a position to eject the Spaniards and secure independence for New Granada.

The opposing generals met again on August 7. Bolívar’s patriot army had grown to more than 2,800 soldiers, while

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Battle of Boyacá AUG. 7, 1819

2,850

BOLÍVAR’S LEGIONS

13

KILLED

53 WOUNDED

2,670

Antonio José de Sucre

ROYALIST TROOPS

100

KILLED

150 WOUNDED, 1,600 CAPTURED

Battle of Carabobo

Francisco de Miranda

JUNE 24, 1821

6,500 300

KILLED AND WOUNDED

4,000

SPANISH TROOPS

2,908

KILLED, WOUNDED AND CAPTURED

Battle of Pichincha MAY 24, 1822

2,971

GRAN COLOMBIAN

TROOPS

200

KILLED

140 WOUNDED

1,894

SPANISH TROOPS

400 KILLED

190 WOUNDED, 1,260 CAPTURED

Barreiro had also secured reinforcements and fielded just under 2,700 men. Catching the Spanish on the march, patriot Gens. Francisco de Paula Santander and José Antonio Anzoátegui moved to split the royalist forces, forcing their small vanguard to take defensive positions at a narrow bridge across the Rio Teatinos. Unable to withstand Santander’s attack, the Spanish van fled across the bridge to a low hill overlooking the river.

Bolívar then ordered a pincer attack. Anzoátegui led the Barcelona and Bravos de Paez battalions against the Spanish main body on the right, while the British Legion and the 1st Rifles under Sandes pressed the attack on the vanguard. Anzoátegui soon drove off the Spanish cavalry and captured the royalist artillery. Meanwhile, advancing uphill in the face of musket and cannon fire, Sandes’ Rifles routed the van, collapsing Spanish resistance.

The patriots captured 1,600 of the enemy, including Barreiro, at a loss of only 13 killed.

When Bolívar entered Bogotá, city officials proffered him a laurel wreath. The patriot commander humbly declined, deeming the men of Sandes’ Rifles more deserving of the honor. He then conferred on each British soldier the Order of Liberators.

The victory resulted in the expulsion of the Spaniards and a weakening of the Spanish efforts farther south. So profound were the changes that present-day Colombians still

celebrate August 7 as a national holiday. The victory also set the stage for campaigns culminating in the independence of Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

While the British Legion and Sandes’ Rifles sustained only light casualties at Boyacá, they were to suffer mightily at Carabobo two years later.

Of all the Latin American countries Caracas-born

Bolívar sought to liberate, perhaps the most difficult to set free was his native Venezuela.

Two successive campaigns—the first in 1810 by Gen. Francisco de Miranda, the second in 1813 by Bolívar—had established the First and Second Republics of Venezuela. Neither lasted long, having been retaken by the Spanish in 1812 and ’14, respectively. When the royalists regained control the second time, Bolívar signed an armistice with the Spanish even while moving to regroup and reorganize his army.

He launched the third campaign for independence in 1821, engaging a royalist army under Gen. Miguel de la Torre near the Rio Carabobo in northern Venezuela on June 24.

Although Bolívar again enjoyed numerical superiority, a patriot victory was far from assured. The Spaniards occupied a strong defensive position on low hills overlooking the main road. A frontal attack would require the patriots to attack uphill in the open. Instead, Bolívar reverted to form and split his forces to attack the Spanish flanks.

Among his veteran forces was the British Legion’s Albion Battalion, comprising some 350 infantry, including 100 Germans. Leading the battalion was Col. Thomas Ilderton Ferrier, an Irishman who had been instrumental in its formation. Bolívar ordered the Albion and a patriot regiment called the Bravos de Apure to attack the Spanish right.

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LUIS ÁNGEL ARANGO LIBRARY, BOGOTÁ; ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

TROOPS

LEFT: DE AGOSTINI (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: IMAGEBROKER (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

GRAN COLOMBIAN

BATTLE OF BOYACÁ

BOGOTÁ

BATTLE OF PICHINCHA

NE W ADA GR AN

LUIS ÁNGEL ARANGO LIBRARY, BOGOTÁ; ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

LEFT: DE AGOSTINI (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: IMAGEBROKER (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

BATTLE OF CARABOBO

While maneuvering into position, the attackers came under point-blank musket fire from three Spanish battalions, and the “bravos” broke and fled. Though under fire, exhausted, low on ammunition and facing overwhelming odds, the men of the Albion fixed bayonets and advanced in line.

One account describes the action as “a task that required not only heroic courage, but Herculean endurance and bulldog determination to keep on while the last spark of life and strength was left.” It was a charge of epic proportions, 200 yards uphill in the face of musket and cannon fire. Despite horrific casualties—exacerbated by uncharacteristic hesitancy on Bolívar’s part—the legion seized the Spanish positions, forcing the enemy troops to break.

Ferrier and a third of his men were killed in the attempt.

Only then did Bolívar commit his reserves. The Spanish retreat soon turned into a rout, leaving more than half of the royalists dead, wounded or captured.

Bolívar’s victory at Carabobo secured both Venezuelan independence and the establishment of Gran Colombia, encompassing present-day Venezuela, Colombia, mainland Ecuador, Panama and parts of Peru and Brazil—Bolívar’s vision of a United States of South America. El Libertador singled out the men of the Albion as the “saviors of my country.”

While Bolívar tended to matters in the north, he entrusted his friend and most able commander, Antonio José

Bolívar’s Gran Colombia encompassed New Granada (present-day Colombia), Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama and parts of Peru and Brazil. The union later fractured into many independent nations.

de Sucre, with command of the southern army, a force of Colombians, Peruvians, Argentines and the British Legions.

In 1822 Sucre resolved to drive the Spanish from their administrative capital at Quito (in the highlands of presentday Ecuador). Bypassing hostile territory, Sucre first led his army south to take Cuenca before turning back north toward

Sucre’s victory at Pichincha marked the beginning of the end of Spanish rule in South America Quito. On May 24 his nearly 3,000-man army confronted some 1,900 royalists under Gen. Melchior Aymerich on the slopes of 15,696-foot Pichincha volcano, overlooking Quito.

Sucre’s intent was to lure Spanish forces from behind the city walls and engage them on the plains below Pichincha.

Troops he sent up its steep, rocky slopes would then emerge from concealment to flank the royalist army. Unfortunately, the patriots on Pichincha’s heights suffered altitude sickness

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As important as the British Legions were in the fight to end Spanish rule in South America, many British, Irish and other European soldiers also served the cause of independence from outside the legions.

Foremost among them was British army veteran William Miller, who rose to command Bolívar’s cavalry during the Peruvian War of Independence. His renowned battlefield awareness was especially evident at the Dec. 9, 1824, Battle of Ayacucho, the decisive encounter the war. Recognizing

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TOP: CARLOS ARIAS/AGENCIA PRESS SOUTH (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: MUSEO NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA

and faced bitter cold and slick trails muddied by rain and snow. Worse yet, Aymerich anticipated Sucre’s strategy and ordered his veteran Aragón Battalion to climb higher than Sucre’s Peruvian Cazadores del Paya and attack from the rear. The furious Spanish assault caught the Peruvians by surprise, prompting their disorderly withdrawal.

The 400-plus men of the Albion Battalion had been in the rear of Sucre’s army, guarding the supply and ammunition train. Seeing his Peruvian battalion falter, Sucre ordered the Albions to climb even higher than the Spanish troops and rout them out with bayonets. Sandes and his men had been itching for a fight, and their unanticipated charge stopped the far larger enemy battalion dead in its tracks. Finding themselves trapped between the Albions, the regrouped Peruvians and Colombian reinforcements of the Alto Magdalena Battalion, the Aragons fled downhill for the safety of Quito’s stout walls, soon followed by the entire royalist army.

The Spanish left 590 dead and wounded on the field along with 14 precious cannons, while the patriots suffered 340 killed and wounded. Hemmed in, Aymerich had no alternative but to surrender his remaining 1,260 troops and the city.

The significance of the Battle of Pichincha is hard to overstate. The victory added Quito (the capital of present-day Ecuador) to Bolívar’s Gran Colombia. It also marked the beginning of the end of Spanish rule in South America. But for the heroic charge of the Albion Battalion that day, the battle may have gone very differently, and a reinvigorated royalist army might have thwarted Bolívar’s revolution.

DE AGOSTINI (GETTY IMAGES)

Bolívar accepts the Spanish flag after his 1821 victory at Carabobo, a battle in which the British Legion’s Albion Battalion suffered mightily.

TOP: CARLOS ARIAS/AGENCIA PRESS SOUTH (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: MUSEO NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA

DE AGOSTINI (GETTY IMAGES)

Ecuadoran troops in period uniforms mark the 198th anniversary of the pivotal battle of Pichincha in 2020. A bayonet charge by the Albion Battalion broke the Royalist line and helped secure Quito for Bolívar.

Sucre’s army was collapsing under a Spanish assault, Miller, without orders, led a charge that stopped the attack. In the wake of the conflict the independent Peruvian government promoted Miller to grand marshal, its highest military rank.

Thomas Cochrane, a successful Royal Navy captain (see “Britain’s Sea Wolf,” by Jerome A. Long, in the November 2021 issue of Military History), left Britain in 1818 to command, in turn, Chile’s and Brazil’s navies. Lord Cochrane was successful in virtually every naval engagement in which he participated. After his service in South America, Cochrane returned to the Royal Navy and was ultimately appointed honorary rear admiral of the United Kingdom.

He is honored as a hero in both Chile and Brazil, and his legendary exploits inspired novelists C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian to create their respective fictional Royal Navy heroes Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey.

Arthur Sandes survived his wounds and the wars, settled in Cuenca and served Ecuador as a general and governor of the Azuay Department.

Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor participated in the Venezuelan revolution almost from its outset. A British army veteran of the Peninsular War, he fought for both Venezuela and New Grenada, rising to the rank of general.

Though initially successful, controversy tainted his otherwise distinguished service after he abandoned contingents of British volunteers in two 1819 campaigns in New Granada.

His postwar reputation plummeted still further. In peacetime he cheated investors and would-be settlers out of large sums of cash by selling bogus bonds and land in the ficti-

tious colony of Poyais, actually a worthless tract he’d been granted in trade by the king of a Honduran indigenous tribe on the Mosquito Coast. Though his was among history’s most brazen schemes, and dozens of settlers died making the trip, a court never convicted him. MacGregor later returned to Venezuela, where he died in 1845. Considered a national hero, he was buried with full military honors at Caracas Cathedral, the resting place of Bolívar’s efforts to recruit British combat veterans Bolívar’s wife and parents. of the Napoléonic Wars While Bolívar held the officers and men were extraordinarily of the British Legions in high regard, the suc- successful, attracting cess of his wars of independence ultimately sharpshooters, foot rests with El Libertador. After all, Bolívar soldiers and mounted was a brilliant and charismatic commander troops. Many of the latter were ultimately whose ability and leadership ensured the assigned to the 1st and inevitable end of royalist rule. Yet the en- 2nd Venezuelan Hussars. durance, daring and courage of his veteran foreign volunteers undoubtedly hastened the day when the Spanish crown no longer reigned over South America. MH

Hussars’ Flag

Jerome A. Long is a former military history instructor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. For further reading he recommends the articles “General Miller and the Confederación PerúBoliviana,” by Robert W. Delaney, and “Bolívar’s British Legion,” by Ian Fletcher, and the book Freedom’s Mercenaries: Northern South America, by Moises Henrique Rodriguez.

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Reviews One of five paintings by American artist Robert Cole illustrating the rise and fall of civilizations, The Course of Empire— Destruction, completed in 1836, depicts the sack of Rome by barbarian hordes.

At the Gates of Rome: The Fall of the Eternal City, ad 410, by Don Hollway, Osprey Publishing/Bloomsbury Publishing, Oxford, U.K., and New York, 2022, $30

In many ways the history of Rome is the story of “barbarians”—those beyond the imperial frontier who looked on Rome with longing, either to conquer and pillage or join and gain protection. Barbarians were lurking at the fringes when Rome clawed its way to power, and they were in on its last gasping breaths in the West. Imperial conflict with barbarians persisted for more than 800 years and shaped Rome in profound ways.

As Plutarch noted, the key to Rome’s success was the assimilation of those whom it conquered. This Romanizing, voluntary or not, of people absorbed within imperial boundaries paid dividends to Romans and barbarians alike.

When the Goths, driven by the Huns, pushed on the boundaries of the empire in the fourth century, Rome struck a deal. In exchange for refuge, the Goths would serve Rome. But the relationship soon soured, and in 378 Eastern

Roman Emperor Valens was killed at Adrianople, Thracia (present-day Edirne, Turkey), trying to contain the thankless guests. Unconquered and unassimilated, the Goths remained a barbarian nation within the imperial borders. The consequences for Rome were profound. At the Gates of Rome examines those tumultuous times.

Author Don Hollway focuses on the decades leading up to the 410 sack of Rome by the Visigoths, an event that exposed an empire spiraling into ever-increasing chaos. But history is not just a chronicle of events; it is the study of people in historical context— their ambitions, virtues, vices, fears and flaws.

A gifted storyteller, Hollway wraps his narrative around the lives of two men prominent within the maelstrom of intrigue and war that marked those decades: Flavius Stilicho, the supreme military commander of Rome and buttress of its teetering throne, and

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Enemy at the Gates

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Reviews Recommended

MI9

By Helen Fry Drawing on declassified files and eyewitness testimonies, author Fry examines the British intelligence service MI9’s role in helping Allied service members escape from behind enemy lines during World War II. The narrative relates escape and evasion stories and previously untold accounts.

Bar Kokhba

By Lindsay Powell British historian Powell chronicles the life and legacy of second century Jewish insurgent Shim’on, who challenged the might of the Roman empire under Hadrian. The author examines period art, archaeology, coins and militaria, and relates his extensive journeys across three continents in search of the facts.

Alaric, king of the Goths, a onetime ally of Rome turned potent enemy.

Skillfully weaving the accounts of ancient chroniclers into a compelling narrative, Hollway relates how these former comrades in arms became opposition leaders in the contest for empire. The author richly contextualizes their stories within the broader history of Rome, giving readers an appreciation of the considerations that weighed on their decisions. Whether describing battles or political plots, Hollway has a knack for breathing life into history.

At the Gates of Rome is a solid work of scholarship as well as a good read.

—Justin D. Lyons

managed to enlist. Murphy participated in every campaign from North Africa to Sicily, mainland Italy, France and Germany, impressing everyone with his courage, aggression and marksmanship and earning every American award for valor, as well as French and Belgian decorations.

Returning Stateside to great acclaim, the young, handsome hero immediately landed a movie contract. Nearly a decade passed before Murphy appeared in a leading role— playing himself in the autobiographical 1955 war film To Hell and Back. But by the 1950s he was a successful star, although he led a stormy personal life until his death in a 1971 plane crash.

Against All Odds: A True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival in World War II, by Alex Kershaw, Dutton Caliber, New York, 2022, $30 Veteran military historian Alex Kershaw delivers admiring accounts of four notable Americans who received the Medal of Honor and more than their share of Purple Hearts during World War II. All attracted worshipful publicity and survived the war more or less intact.

Perhaps inevitably the author opens with Audie Murphy, the most familiar of the quartet. The son of a Texas sharecropper who deserted his family amid the Depression, Murphy dropped out of school in the fifth grade to support his family at odd jobs.

At the outset of the war, though underage and undersized, he

Considered the great American hero of World War II (like Alvin York of World War I), Murphy was not the original.

That honor belonged to Maurice Britt. A standout end on the college gridiron, he was playing professional football with the Detroit Lions when called up. No less audacious than Audie, he was faster than Murphy at securing every American medal for valor be-

fore losing an arm at Anzio in 1944.

Britt returned Stateside to a hero’s welcome. Fawned over by journalists and invited to speak at war bond rallies, he was the Sergeant York of his time until Murphy (who didn’t receive his Medal of Honor till war’s end) returned home and superseded him.

Kershaw’s third American hero is Keith L. Ware, who was supporting his family as a department store manager when drafted. Earning selection to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga., he rose through the ranks while fighting in Europe, receiving the Medal of Honor for having single-handedly stormed a German hilltop position.

He remained in the postwar Army, rose to major general and was killed in action in Vietnam while commanding the 1st Infantry Division.

The fourth, Michael J. Daly, seemed unlikely material. Entering West Point in 1942, he set a record for demerits, dropped out and enlisted as a private. Landing at Normandy on D-Day, he amazed everyone with his battlefield feats.

He, too, received the Medal of Honor for having stormed an enemy strongpoint. Within weeks of the German surrender he sustained a disfiguring facial injury. Returning Stateside, Daly rarely appeared in public, though he went on to a successful business career.

While Kershaw steps back regularly to deliver the bigger picture, he focuses most of his narrative on the smallscale accounts of gruesome individual heroism. All are admirable. As there are only

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so many ways to kill, some repetition is inevitable, but military buffs will know what to expect.

—Mike Oppenheim On Bloody Sunday: A New History of the Day and Its Aftermath—By Those Who Were There, by Julieann Campbell, Monoray, London, 2022, $29.99 The “Bloody Sunday” killings of Jan. 30, 1972, remain among the greatest stains in British and Irish history.

As both nations mark its 50th anniversary, this book (along with Douglas Murray’s Bloody Sunday: Truth Lies and the Saville Inquiry) joins a growing list of related titles. Author Campbell, a niece of slain Catholic protester Jackie Duddy, presents the collected oral histories of more than 100 participants, survivors and officials, including 20 accounts pub-

lished here for the first time.

Among those interviewed are such notable Catholic and Irish Republican figures as Bishop Edward Daly, John Hume and Martin McGuiness. The author interweaves such personal narratives with contemporary news

accounts and British government documents, supported with photographs, endnotes and glossaries.

Partitioned off from the rest of Ireland in 1921, the six counties of Northern Ireland were inhabited largely by willing British subjects, a majority of whom were Protestant. Living among them were an underrepresented Catholic minority who chafed under local rule known as Stormont. Inspired by the American civil rights movement, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association organized public marches in the late 1960s.

Unfortunately, among the peaceful protesters were rock-throwing hooligans and bomb-throwing IRA gunmen, who prompted retaliation from Protestant police and paramilitary forces as well as British soldiers.

The rising violence led to the deaths of civilians and security forces alike. During the march in Derry on Bloody Sunday 1972, however, the elite British Parachute Regiment, aka “Red Devils,” lived up to their sanguinary nickname, shooting 26 unarmed protesters, 14 of whom died.

An initial British government inquiry by Chief Justice John Widgery sided with the British army’s account of the incident, including false claims they’d been fired on. Only after years of campaigning did victims’ survivors receive a measure of closure with the British Parliament’s Saville Inquiry, published in 2010, which squarely blamed the soldiers and exonerated the victims previously classified as terrorists. While no soldiers faced prosecution,

British Prime Minister David Cameron did apologize on behalf of the British government.

Campbell’s narrative presents a nearly real-time impression of events as the voices of those present relate their collective experience of that tumultuous day. Her book is a reality check and poignant reminder of the human toll of conflict.

—William John Shepherd A Raid on the Red Sea: The Israeli Capture of the Karine A, by Amos Gilboa, edited and translated by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Potomac Books, Lincoln, Neb., 2021, $34.95 In the early morning hours of Jan. 3, 2002, a team of Israeli navy commandos boarded the Palestinianowned merchant ship Karine A and seized a 50-ton cache of arms that had been provided by Iran and Hezbollah, loaded aboard in Yemen and slated for terrorists in Gaza. Backed by combat helicopters and aircraft, the Israeli team executed its daring raid in the Red Sea, some 130 miles south of the Gulf of Aqaba, far from any friendly bases of operation.

The most spectacular and successful Israeli clandestine operation into foreign territory since the 1976 hostage-rescue mission at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the Red Sea raid proved far more than just a setback to terrorist attacks against Israel. The arms-smuggling operations had been organized and financed by the highest levels of the Palestinian Authority, the Iranian government and the Lebanon-based Hezbol-

lah. Its failure and the resulting international exposure struck a damaging blow to perceptions—particularly by the United States government—of the Palestinian Authority as a force for peace in the Middle East.

The raid itself marked the culmination of an intelligence/counterintelligence duel rivaling the most convoluted spy novels of such writers as Len Deighton or John le Carré. A Raid on the

Red Sea reveals how Yasser Arafat and co-conspirators from Gaza, Lebanon and Iran conceived and executed a plan to smuggle the arms into Gaza by ship utilizing watertight containers deposited offshore and then towed ashore by small fishing boats. Author Amos Gilboa then relates how Israeli naval intelligence uncovered the plan, identified the ship and tracked it from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. He then outlines the Israeli navy operation to successfully intercept the ship at night hundreds of miles from their support base. The resulting narrative is a true-life technothriller worthy of any work of fiction on the best seller lists.

—Robert Guttman

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Knight Museum & Sandhills Center & Sallows Military Museum

Chart your Course to experience the unexpected discoveries in and around Alliance, Nebraska where there is history at every turn.

From scenic drives, to our local brewery, remarkable parks, rich art and the legendary Carhenge; you will be transported to a nostalgic place where quaint shops line our historic downtown brick paved streets and folks you’ve never met will smile and wave. Our hospitality and beauty of our city will leave you wanting to come back for more.

Veteran's Cemetery

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Hallowed Ground Harpers Ferry, West Virginia over to the Confederacy, but a Union officer had his men torch the buildings before fleeing to Pennsylvania. Within days Col. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson arrived with the Virginia militia to occupy town. His men salvaged what they could from the armory ruins, including thousands of rifle stocks and much of the machinery. Ringed in as it is by mountains, however, Harpers Ferry was considered indefensible by Jackson’s successor, Confederate Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who withdrew south to Winchester, Va., in June 1861.

A month later Union troops under Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson occupied Harpers Ferry. The town changed hands five more times before Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks made it his headquarters in late February 1862. That May, during his famed Shenandoah Valley campaign, Jackson attacked Harpers Ferry, but Union Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton successfully repelled him. Three months later Lee launched his first invasion of the North and needed a secure supply line from the Shenandoah. Taking a risk, he split his forces.

Returning to Harpers Ferry, Jackson defeated 14,000 Union troops under Col. Dixon Miles and captured the town on September 15. He then joined Lee in Maryland for the September 17 Battle of Antietam—the bloodiest single-day clash of the war—which ended with Lee’s retreat and Harpers Ferry back in Union hands.

Harpers Ferry remained under federal control until July 1, 1863, when Union troops who’d been defeated during the Second Battle of Winchester withdrew. When they returned eight days later, Harpers Ferry was no longer in Confederate territory, as on June 20 it and 24,000 square miles to the south and west had been subsumed by the newly admitted state of West Virginia. Union troops briefly lost the town again on July 4, 1864, during Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s bold raid on Washington, D.C., but he withdrew within days, and Union soldiers were back for the war’s duration. A month later Harpers Ferry served as the stepping-off point for Union Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s brilliant campaign that permanently claimed the Shenandoah Valley from the Confederates.

In 1944 the heart of Harpers Ferry, including the engine house known as “John Brown’s Fort,” was established as Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. The touristy town also hosts the National Park Service’s media center and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. MH

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N

estled amid the Blue Ridge Mountains at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, Harpers Ferry is the northern gateway to Virginia’s fecund Shenandoah Valley. Originally settled in 1733 as a ferry landing on the Potomac, the site on which the present-day town sits was bought by its namesake, Robert Harper, in 1751. Harper continued the lucrative ferry as settlers increasingly moved south into the valley. George Washington had business interests in the area, and family lived nearby, including younger brother Charles, the namesake founder of Charles Town. In 1794 Washington proposed Harpers Ferry as the site of the new U.S. Arsenal and Armory, which opened in 1801. The armory turned out more than a half million firearms before being destroyed at the 1861 outset of the Civil War. The village industrialized further in the 1830s with the arrival of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Harpers Ferry exploded on the naMD. tional scene in 1859 when radical abolitionist John Brown raided the HARPERS FERRY arsenal. Believing an armed slave WEST POTOMAC RIVER insurrection in Virginia would VIRGINIA ultimately result in the demise of SHENANDOAH the “peculiar institution” throughRIVER VA. out the South, Brown and 21 followers armed themselves with rifles and revolvers and seized the armory on Oct. 16, 1859. Ironically, a free black railroad worker named Shepherd Heyward was the first casualty. Confronted by armed citizens bolstered by militia from nearby Charles Town, Martinsburg and Shepherdstown, as well as Frederick, Md., Brown and his followers were trapped in a small fire engine house. Two days later Col. Robert E. Lee, commanding a detachment of U.S. Marines from Washington, D.C., ended the fighting. Seven prisoners, including Brown, were soon tried and executed.

In the raid’s aftermath war clouds billowed as states addressed the matter of secession following Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election to the presidency. Residents of Harpers Ferry and neighboring towns expressed loyalty to the Union during Virginia’s secession debate. When the state did secede, an armory supervisor with Rebel sympathies sought to turn it

MAP BY BRIAN WALKER; OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MARK FICKETT, CC BY-SA 3.0

By William John Shepherd

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MAP BY BRIAN WALKER; OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MARK FICKETT, CC BY-SA 3.0

Essentially unscathed during the suppression of John Brown’s raid, Harpers Ferry was heavily damaged during the Civil War (top). Today the town is a popular tourist attraction and site of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.

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War Games 1

3 2

Death of Arturo Prat

4

5

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Miguel Grau Seminario Bernardo O’Higgins Alfredo Stroessner Bernard Artigau John Patrick Riley Ambrosio O’Higgins Francisco Terry Sanchez Arturo Prat

6 7

Basque-born Argentine in ___ A. French air service, 1917–18 Irish-descended Spanish ___ B. viceroy of Peru, 1796 ___ C. Catalan-descended Chilean naval captain, KIA 1879 ___ D. German-descended Peruvian admiral, KIA 1879 ___ E. Irish-descended first supreme director of Chile, 1817–23

8

9

10

Against the Odds

Can you identify the legendary hero or unit? ___ A. Sacred Band of Thebes, Chaeronea, 338 bc

___ F. Fritz Klingenberg, Belgrade, 1941

___ B. Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague, Samar, 1944

___ G. Leonidas I, Thermopylae, 480 bc

Cuban in French air ___ G. service, 1916

___ C. Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard, Garagliano, 1503

___ H. John Chard, Rorke’s Drift, 1879

Irish-born U.S. Army ___ H. soldier, defected to Mexican army, 1846

___ D Publius Horatius Cocles, Pons Sublicius, 509 bc

___ I. 36th Sikhs, Saragarhi, 1897

___ E. Jean Danjou, Camarón, 1863

___ J. Werner Voss, Poelkapelle, 1917

Answers: A3, B10, C5, D8, E2, F6, G9, H1, I7, J4

Bavarian-descended ___ F. Paraguayan in Chaco War, 1932

Answers: A4, B6, C8, D1, E2, F3, G7, H5

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MIRRORPIX (GETTY IMAGES)

Can you match each of the following South American military figures to his wartime affiliation?

LEFT: ESCUELA NAVAL ARTURO PRAT; 1: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON; 2: LEVIN01, CC BY-SA 3.0; 3: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES; 4: CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES); 5: FONDS DAUPHINOIS; 6: SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); 7: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; 8: RIJKSMUSEUM; 9: ROLF RICHARDSON (ALAMY); 10: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Southpaws

Air China

Some of China’s pioneering top guns were American citizens, and at least one flew for France. Recognize any?

1. Which pilot is credited with the first Chinese air-to-air victories during World War I? A. Feng Ru B. Liu Chi-sheng C. Zhu Binhou D. Gao Chi-hang 2. Who is credited with the first air-to-air victory for the Republic of China?

A. Wang Guangfu B. Liu Chi-sheng C. John Wong Pan-yang D. Gao Zhihang 3. Who became the highestscoring Chinese ace before World War II? A. Liu Chi-Sheng B. Zhu Binhou C. Wang Guangfu D. Chin An-yi

MIRRORPIX (GETTY IMAGES)

4. Which 8½-victory Chinese air force ace was an American volunteer from Portland, Oregon?

A. John Wong Pan-yang B. “Clifford” Louie Yim-qun C. John “Buffalo” Huang Xinrui D. Arthur Chin 5. Who was the leading Republic of China ace during World War II? A. Kao Yu-hsin B. Wang Guangfu C. Liu Chung-wu D. Lu Ji-chun

John J. Pershing, Jeb Stuart, Adna R. Chaffee Jr., Walton Walker, or Stonewall Jackson?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: STONEWALL JACKSON. THE M46 PATTON WAS ONE OF THE U.S ARMY’S PRINCIPAL MEDIUM TANKS OF THE EARLY COLD WAR, WITH MODELS IN SERVICE FROM 1949 UNTIL THE MID-1950s.

Answers: 1C, 2D, 3A, 4D, 5B

LEFT: ESCUELA NAVAL ARTURO PRAT; 1: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON; 2: LEVIN01, CC BY-SA 3.0; 3: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES; 4: CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES); 5: FONDS DAUPHINOIS; 6: SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); 7: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; 8: RIJKSMUSEUM; 9: ROLF RICHARDSON (ALAMY); 10: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Republic of China Air Force, 1943

THE M SERIES PATTON TANKS ARE NAMED FOR GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON. WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING GENERALS NEVER HAD A TANK NAMED IN HIS HONOR?

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Captured!

Flex Time

THREE LIONS (GETTY IMAGES)

Despite contortionistic appearances, this snapshot captures two exhausted GIs, with grenades and a bayonet at hand, catching some Z’s in a slit trench offering natural cover. Barely two weeks after the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings in France, the soldiers and their unit were well into the grueling campaign to root German defenders out of the Normandy hedgerows.

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A demonstration ride.

rollingtoremember.com

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